Philosophical Investigations, reading it together.
I propose reading Philosophical Investigations as a group for the sake of discussing the work.
It cannot be said I am a "leader" of the enterprise. This book has not been the center of my studies and I am not well read in a number of the contemporaries Wittgenstein must surely have understood to be among those who are being addressed. On the other hand, his approach invites all to consider his remarks. Count me as one of them.
As a starting point, I propose reading up to remark 155 over the next week or so and confining forum responses to address what is to be found therein. As your "leader", I will be looking for some kind of consensus to move on. If a coup d'é·tat were to occur during the process, things happen.
I chose remark 155 as a stopping point because it is the last one concerning "understanding" before Wittgenstein takes up "reading" in remark 156.
It cannot be said I am a "leader" of the enterprise. This book has not been the center of my studies and I am not well read in a number of the contemporaries Wittgenstein must surely have understood to be among those who are being addressed. On the other hand, his approach invites all to consider his remarks. Count me as one of them.
As a starting point, I propose reading up to remark 155 over the next week or so and confining forum responses to address what is to be found therein. As your "leader", I will be looking for some kind of consensus to move on. If a coup d'é·tat were to occur during the process, things happen.
I chose remark 155 as a stopping point because it is the last one concerning "understanding" before Wittgenstein takes up "reading" in remark 156.
Comments (1796)
How about starting at the start? Does anyone have anything to say about the format of this book regarding how Wittgenstein had kept hold of these disjointed ideas for s long time before finally giving up on presenting them as one whole idea.
That in itself is an interesting choice.
Once we’ve expressed his reason for presenting the work as he has then we can get into the first couple of pages.
I have a week off and will be spending some time studying/teaching different things and I’m always up for a challenge to “organise” things.
Anyway, if everyone wants to follow my lead I’m happy to do my best. If enough people are willing and able to churn through so much in a week then I’ll leave things as be. I’ve tried in depth discussions before and they fell flat because people simply couldn’t find the time to read everything.
The bonus with Philosophical Investigations is that it is a collection of thoughts - kind of a stream of consciousness - so much so that there is a direction to the flow, yet there are plenty of eddies to stop and play in as separate themes.
Without a doubt the thing that struck me from the outset was the use of the term “ostensive.”
Anyway: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54889e73e4b0a2c1f9891289/t/564b61a4e4b04eca59c4d232/1447780772744/Ludwig.Wittgenstein.-.Philosophical.Investigations.pdf
Better to start with comments about the Preface and 1-7 so people can find their feet first.
I'm fine with that. Anyone else?
There is no “message” in this book. It is a collection of thoughts that surround some figure of W’s general interest. What that figure is is the unasked question and he spends a lot of time trying his hardest to avoid asking this question - and get closer to some feel of it by doing so imo.
If you’ve read philosophy before this is not like any other work. It’s order is much more like a stream of consciousness, sets of thoughts on specific subjects interwoven into some “weltanschauung.” It’s enjoyable, amusing, sometimes purposefully naive, and in the end will likely reveal questions to the reader they never knew they wanted to ask.
I agree. What Valentinus asked for is to cover a large amount of complex and varied material in a short period of time.
I nominate I like sushi as "the leader".
Your approach makes sense.
Thank you for taking on the task of organizing.
How many people are likely to join in?
secundum earn vocem corpus ad aliquid movebant, videbam, et
tenebam hoc ab eis vocari rem illam, quod sonabant, cum earn vellent
ostendere. Hoc autem eos veile ex motu corporis aperiebatur: tamquam
verbis naturalibus omnium gentium, quae fiunt vultu et nutu oculorum,
ceterorumque membrorum actu, et sonitu vocis indicante affectionem
animi in petendis, habendis, rejiciendis, fugiendisve rebus. Ita verba in
variis sententiis locis suis posita, et crebro audita, quarum rerum signa
essent, paulatim colligebam, measque jam voluntates, edomito in eis
signis ore, per haec enuntiabam." (Augustine, Confessions, I. 8.)
What does this mean? Starting this reading group with a quote from Augustine. Hehe.
""When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly
moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was
called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out.
Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the
natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of
the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice
which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or
avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their
proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand
what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form
these signs, I used them to express my own desires."
From this description, Wittgenstein says:
"In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands."
I see how this correspondence is indicated in Augustine's text. But It is striking to me how the references to gesture, tone, and context are brought into the narrative as part of learning the meaning. It reminds me of Wittgenstein. In this vein, I wonder if Augustine would have agreed with the observation:
"Augustine does not speak of there being any difference between
kinds of word. If you describe the learning of language in this way
you are, I believe, thinking primarily of nouns like "table", "chair",
"bread", and of people's names, and only secondarily of the names of
certain actions and properties; and of the remaining kinds of word as
something that will take care of itself."
This is a translation of all of Book 1, Chapter 8 of Augustine's Confessions translated by Albert C Outler - it's just a bit more than what Wittgenstein cited:
There's a view of language that posits it as being learned ostensively.
Language isn't just a matter of naming objects. There are words that represent actions, abstractions, etc. (and in fact, naming objects a la types as opposed to "proper names" is itself an abstraction--not a point that Wittgenstein has made yet, but a point of my own).
This all seems rather "Duh!" to me so far. And Wittgenstein is both laboriously and overly sketchily/sloppily going through all of this "Duh" material.
Presumably (it's been awhile since I've read the book), it's going to somehow lead up to Wittgenstein claiming that language can't be learned ostensively because of the above, but I disagree that that follows. Words representing actions, abstractions, etc. can definitely be learned ostensively.
First, I'm confused by "Slab I" ("Slab
And then he introduces the term "elliptical sentence" as if we're supposed to know what he has in mind by "elliptical." I have no idea. If I ever learned what "elliptical sentence" was supposed to be in Wittgenstein or elsewhere, I sure have no memory of it at the moment.
At any rate re his question, "Is it a word or a sentence?" It can either be a word or a sentence or both (or neither, actually), depending on the individual we ask/how they think about it.
Re "How do you mean something when you say 'Slab1''? "How you mean something" is a manner of speaking that doesn't very well literally capture what's going on. Meaning is in individuals' heads. We can suppose that you'll have a meaning in your head when you say "Slab1," if you're Wittgenstein's A, say, and then if you're Wittgenstein's B, you'll also have a meaning in your head when you hear A say "Slab1." That's what it amounts to for someone to "mean something" when they say "Slab1." Glad I could be of service.
Re "Do you say the unshortened sentence to yourself?" Again, it depends on the person. Some people might internally translate it into something else. Some won't. Usually the reason someone would internally translate a word or expression is because it's not a word or expression they normally use, and it seems odd to them or difficult to remember, so by rote, as an attempt to remember it, they'll translate it to something that is less odd, makes more sense to them, etc. I have to do this if I'm trying to read someone like Heidegger--I have to internally translate all of the stupid terms he makes up ("present-to-hand," "ready-at-hand" etc.) into something that I can remember/something that makes more sense to me.
"Why should you translate it"--just depends on how you think about it. It's not that you should or shouldn't. It's simply a matter of how an individual thinks about it.
A question he doesn't ask but that we can answer based on his comments about it is that the reason you'd translate it to someone else is when they don't understand you when you say one thing. The translation is an attempt to produce understanding, based on terms/expressions they are familiar with.
Re "in contrast with," yes, that would be a way of thinking about it, so it would require someone to explicitly think of contrasts. That's not going astray. Wittgenstein's alternate account is rather going astray. The contrast isn't going to be because of "possibilities in the language," as if possibilities somehow exist "in themselves," as if abstracts somehow exist independently of us thinking about things a la abstractions.
Re the comments about the foreigner, yes, again, different people can think about it differently. If it's clear to us that they're thinking about a sentence that's written as four different words as if they'd believe that it would be written as one word a la the conventions of the language, we'd try to inform them about the conventions.
Re the question about thinking about the sentence in Russian as opposed to English, I don't know. I can speak/read at least a bit of French, German, Spanish, Greek and Latin, but I pretty much have to translate them all into English in my head. That might not be the case if I were ever immersed in one of those languages for awhile--if I were to live in France, Germany, etc. for an extended period of time, but I don't know, as I've never lived outside of the U.S. for any extended period of time.
Re the comments about language "mastery," that's broader, and would normally be an evaluation of a wide range of someone's writing and/or speaking.
I'll stop at 20 for today.
If you're working off the PDF, I think that's an OCR error. It's just 'Slab!', with an exclamation mark in my copy of the book.
With respect to §19 as a whole, I will only comment that the whole section needs to be read in light of the two most important sentences which can be found at the beginning and end of the section respectively:
(1) "To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life".
(2) "does 'wanting this' consist in thinking in some form or other a different sentence from the one you utter"? (my bolding)
It's clear that §19 is meant to answer the question (2) in the negative (it does not consist in thinking in some form or other a different sentence form the one you utter). In place of 'thought', what is offered is 'a form of life'. Witty does not at this point comment too much on what he means by this, but as a start, §19 is meant to pick apart the equation of 'wanting this' with 'thinking'.
Ah, thanks. Yeah, I was using the pdf--I'm not sure where my copy of the book is. I searched for it a bit yesterday, but I've got a bunch of books out of order, scattered all over the place, etc.
Re (1), I agree with him, but only in the sense that I'd agree it probably doesn't make much sense to talk about a language (in this sense) as occurring sans meaning, and for meaning, we need persons who are thinking about the language.
Re (2), I'd once again say that it's just a matter of what words (what sounds/text strings) have what meanings and associations for an individual. It's a matter of how an individual thinks about it. So I don't agree with Wittgenstein answering "no." Re "a form of life in place of thought," that makes no sense to me. Again, I ony agree with "to imagine a language means (implies rather) imagining a form of life" as I described above. I wouldn't agree with that otherwise.
Thanks for that text. It completes the thought I was trying to have.
I particularly like this part:
It resonates with Wittgenstein's examples of learning a language.
When he says "Slab!", and he means "please bring me a slab", I think: "that fucking asshole is asking me for another fucking slab again, when he hasn't even used the last one I brought him yet. Fuck off and leave me alone boss."
Quoting StreetlightX
Most often, we are thinking something different from what we utter. That's why we ought to separate meaning from intent, what the person says, and what the words mean, does not accurately, or truly reflect the person's intentions. If we do not recognize this separation, and think that what a person says necessarily reflects what the person thinks, the deception has been successful. For sure, what the person wants, and what that person says, are quite distinct.
So at #21, "five slabs" has no definitive meaning because the meaning has been separated from the intent. It might be a command or it could be a report. It has a "sense" according to how it is being used.
But why thought? In saying 'Slab!', it is not 'thought' at stake but actions. I want that person over there to hand me that slab next to him. The sound 'slab!' initiates a movement of bodies and things, and its role in the transaction is functional. It is only within the context of me over here, you over there, a slab further away, and perhaps a structure to be built that the sound 'slab!' attains its particular sense in that situation. This 'context' - which is largely extra-lingustic and extra-mentalistic - is what Witty refers to as 'a form of life'.
The series of rhetorical questions in §19 is meant to highlight the irrelavency of the line of questioning it pursues: if one keeps looking to translate words into other words, framing meaning as a wholly intra-linguistic rather than always already bound up within a broader context of actions, things, projects, and movements, one cannot understand what is going on when one shouts 'slab!'. If one tries to understand 'slab!' in only in terms of sentences and thoughts (or thoughts of sentences) - rather than actions and practices - one will miss how it is that 'slab!' can function to initiate action - and subsequently, 'mean' anything at all.
Well said. Action grounds meaning which is distributed throughout an entire form of life(oversimplifying which may be impossible to avoid, which may be the point). That certain words like 'cat' bring an image to our mind is misleading. What does 'misleading' bring to our mind out of context? Or 'context'? And yet we use these words transparently.
At a certain age we are so trained in a language that our minds are privately differentiated when it comes to various brightly conscious beliefs. We can experience distance. We can not be understood and realize that there is reason the notion of subject meaning was born. But all of this seems to made possible by a deep immersion in the form of life. And we still obey the traffic lights. We are just so good at moving in the form of life that we only notice the gaps, our prized ideas that are hard to communicate. I'd say these brightly lit and lonely prized ideas are the tip of an iceberg.
No one seems to have mentioned (at a glance) the point being made in the opening about apples - that is the manner in which words are understood. We do not simple follow a set of sequential points in order to understand something. We do not apprehend the “red,” “apple,” or “five” as separate concepts when they’re uttered in the manner given. To say this is what W calls a “primitive language.”
This may be obvious to everyone but thought I’d point it out anyway - the obvious is often too easily overlooked.
Quoting I like sushi
I don't recognize this as a very good example, because it attempts to understand something complex through a simple division and analysis. So "five red apples" is explained by looking up the meaning of the individual words. And that's a faulty premise, from the beginning. It is not necessary to break a thing into its composite parts to have an understanding of the whole.
Wittgenstein uses this example to proceed toward the separation between language use and thought, talking about how we might understand an entire phrase as if it were one word, and this supports the later implication that thought is not necessarily required in order to understand a phrase What follows is the removal of thought, as the medium between what is wanted, and what is said. I would say that the argument is not conclusive. Just because we do not actively analyze the phrase, breaking it into parts to understand it, this does not produce the conclusion that no thought is involved. Analyzing is only one type of thinking.
Quoting macrosoft
I would argue that Wittgenstein's procedure of grounding meaning in action rather than thought, does not really resolve any problems. Both thought and action are grounded in intent, what one wants. So what Wittgenstein does here is remove the medium of thought, which is generally believed to exist between intent and action. Now we need to establish a direct relation between what is said and what is wanted, without reference to the medium of thought. We could say that reference to thought is unreliable and deceptive, so we must go directly to intent. But how could the determination of intent be any more reliable than the determination of thought?
What we are left with is the direct interpretation of intent through actions. The question of course, is whether it is more reliable to determine one's intent by one's actions, or to determine one's thoughts by one's actions, and then proceed toward one's intent through that determination of thought. There is a three way relation, intent, thought, and action. We cannot completely exclude thought from the scenario, as Wittgenstein might imply, because thought is what allows for deception which is when one's actions do not properly reflect one's intentions
Compare Ikea's pictorial instructions: the intent is shared, and it is to construct the cabinet. I don't need to infer that as if it is opaque.
Compare the conductor's gestures to the orchestra - the 'please' gesture is not used.
We know what we are about, (except when we are philosophising or politicking) - to the extent, sometimes, that meaning is reduced to rhythmic coordination: "I don't know but I've been told...", "What shall we do with the drunken sailor?"
'Compare!'
'What is Wittgenstein's intent?'
Wait, "the form of life" is another way of saying "life-form," right? In other words, a synonym for some species or other. What would be a "deep immersion" in a life-form?
Otherwise, I have no idea what "the form of life" is saying.
:lol:
Because that's what both wanting something and meaning are--mental phenomena.
Quoting StreetlightX
"At stake," sure. But the question was what wanting something consists of (or consists "in").
Quoting StreetlightX
All words attain meaning via how individuals think about them.
Quoting StreetlightX
The environment certainly impacts how people think about things (although not necessarily), but the environmental elements in themselves are not meaning. Meaning is what's happening in an individual's head. If he's calling a "context" a "form of life," that's not at all something I'd agree with, and I'd suggest that we don't get so poetic when we're doing philosophy, because I'm not of the opinion that it helps.
Quoting StreetlightX
It's not a matter of translating words into other words per se. We could set up a machine to do that (a la the Chinese Room, say), but the machine wouldn't be doing meaning. Meaning is the mental act of making associations, not necessarily associating words with words--it could be an association of anything with anything else, really. Nevertheless, that's mental and can't be made something else.
Understanding is a matter of making mental associations, including with respect to observed phenomena, behavior (including linguistic utterances), etc., in a manner that is coherent and consistent in one's opinion, and mutual understanding obtains when multiple parties are in this state with respect to one another.
What is "transparent" use of words?
I don't agree that we can say that as a universal generalization. Different people are going to think about language in different ways. Someone may very well divide red, apple, etc. into separate concepts. Other people may not think about them that way. It's not the same for every person.
A 'form of life' is the way of living of an entire community. It's the way we talk, for one thing, but also how we drive on the roads, wave to one another, hold ceremonies when one of us dies, put on conical hats on birthdays, etc. We don't pick the closest urinal to one being used if possible or just stare at the strangers. We see a certain concrete structure and [s]know[/s] these are stairs to walk up. How much of our getting around in the world has become automatic for us to smoothly fit in with other human beings in our everyday lives?
I refer to the way that words just pour out of us on the one hand and are immediately understood on the other. In most cases no effort is required. Language is not experienced as something 'in our way' that meaning has to be shoved through or sifted from. Language is the 'hammer' that vanishes in the hammering --suddenly becoming conspicuous when there's a problem. For instance, in philosophy language is radically conspicuous right now. Or rather what we are talking about (the transparency) is foregrounded by other words that we already understand and use like our hands reaching to turn a doorknob.
I agree with you here. The question is about the nature of subjective of meaning. It's not the juxtaposition of meaning cubes in one's mind.
Very simple sentences with nouns that bring images to one's mind are, admittedly, closer to this juxtaposition of meaning cubes. But high-level talking about talking manifests the complexity of the living relationship between the words in a sentence. Something like a cloud of meaning is generated by putting words together. It is not like a train of meaning crystals.
Hmm. but the "entire community" isn't a bunch of Stepford Wives. People talk in different ways in a community. Do you mean something like an abstracted average, a la "the average couple have 2.3 kids" (or whatever the number is exactly), or are we only focusing on normals to the exclusion of the weirdos (something I very much do not like doing), or?
As I see it, the attempt to really ground the entire system in this or that part is more or less doomed. Language is there like our lives. I mentioned grounding it in action, but this is really attempt to point at the dissolution of the word/action dichotomy. Let's think of waves, nods, winks, turn signals, words like 'hi.' We don't have clear propositional content on one side and mute action on another. These are extremes on a continuum.
As far as I can tell, there's just no way to squeeze this grasp/ground of how to be in a community of speakers and doers in one small aspect of that speaking-doing. This is the operating system that we look through like clean glass most of the time.
But my theory accounts for that, despite the fact that I'm stressing that meaning is strictly a brain phenomenon.
Quoting macrosoft
That's like one of those Heideggerian straw men. No one is suggesting as much.
Again, it would be a straw man to assume that I ever said anything like "it only works in cubes"
I'm not saying your theory is wrong. I'm just pointing out transparency.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Again, just explaining 'transparency.' That entities can exist for us in this way seems worth noticing, given a tendency to think that only static, conspicuous entities are real.
One thing I like to do is talk about the location of phenomena. In my view, the idea that there are any phenomena without a location is incoherent. The location might be pretty complex, and we might need to talk about a lot of different, sometimes separated locations functioning together, but there's still going to be a location. Nothing exists that has "no location."
I'm not saying that that is your view. If you agree that the meaning in sentences is very un-cube-like, then that's something we can agree on and investigate. IMO, this is a big deal. If words don't trap meaning-cubes then we can't really do math with them except in very simple cases. We are thrust into a more complex interpretative situation.
Okay, but you're taking it to be evidence of public/shared/etc. meaning. It's not, because the phenomena in question are consistent with a theory of private/not-shared etc. meaning, too.
I don't agree with that either as a universal generalization. What I'd say is that it depends on how a particular individual is thinking about it, and different individuals can think about it in very different ways.
If we say, as a universal generalization, that meaning in sentences is very un-cube-like then Joe might object with, "Hold on a minute! At least for sentences x, y and z, I think of meaning as extremely cube-like!"
I can understand that leaning, but I think the movement of meaning itself is dynamic. It makes sense to put meaning in the head. I agree. But how does meaning exist in the head? If we explore our use of words, I don't think we can pin-point meaning in any particular word. Endings of sentences can point to their beginning. This is why time is a big deal for Heidegger. In some sense meaning-making is time.
Definitely. I think everything is dynamic. Dynamic things have locations.
Quoting macrosoft
As associations that individuals make, and different individuals can do this in very different ways.
I'd agree myself that in simple sentences it is fairly cube like. 'The sandwich is on the table.' Very simple sentences involving familiar objects suggests the cube-like-ness of meaning. The atomic view of meaning makes sense here. But complex sentences such as occur in our conversation right now are more sensibly interpreted in the light of holism.
I agree, but now we've shift to 'associations.' What or how is an association?
I don't know if you're understanding me. I wouldn't say something like that either. Again, it depends on the individual in question. Different people can think about the same thing (the same sentence) in very different ways. We can't make a generalization about how meaning works for anything (that is, in terms of specifics, exact content, etc.) that would be spot-on, because it's always possible (even if it doesn't contingently obtain at some point in time) for some individual to think about it differently than what we proposed. It's also important to note that this wouldn't always (or maybe even most of the time or often) be apparent.
A type of inherently mental linking, implication, and the like.
I agree. But see how we keep shifting from word to word. It's clear that no particular word is going to finally say it and contain the elemental meaning. This is that 'mental linking' trying to name itself. It can only do so by linking yet more words to those already being used.
I read that line as saying we are not checking if the words correspond one to one to "objects" as they are represented in the Augustine quote. Their "separateness" is a different matter. The point of the statement being to observe the practice of "checking" in this matter to other possible ways to understand what is being said.
Wittgenstein is trying to get us to think about the matter as an assembly of habits.
It's always possible that everyone but me is an android passing the Turing test, logically possible. But I'd say we just do act within a massive field of presuppositions as we speak. I think you are worrying too much about epistemology and not introspecting enough. If you like, just report your own experience and don't worry about that of others. We can't do a certain kind of science. Science is itself caught up in that same ambiguity.
I'd say that you write these posts with a profound 'faith' in their sufficient intelligibility. I work from these basic presuppositions that structure consciousness --using these same structures. It's not an exact science.
In which cubic millimeter of the brain does meaning live? Or does it exist as a mathematical point? At which exact instant does meaning live? I suggest that we have unwittingly projected physical science concepts on our experience of meaning so that its complexity is covered up.
And how would we know that others do so in different ways? How would we determine that? We presuppose some kind of overlap to talk about deviations from this overlap.
I don't think you understand what I mean by 'shared meaning.' It's not a supernatural 'thing' in the world. We can just describe it as a structure of first-person experience. If I am talking to a computer who passes the Turing test, that doesn't mean I don't experience 'shared meaning.' The theory of shared meaning can still be true if there is only one more human being alive hanging out with androids without knowing it. It's a sense that accompanies speaking and writing. It is the realm of intelligibility.
A man survives a nuclear war in a bomb shelter. He fortunately has lots of books. He reads his favorite philosophers. He experiences the words in these books as the voice of a person. A language user is never 'alone' in a peculiar sense. They grasp themselves as individuals with a language that is inherently geared to world and a community. There's no way to prove this. I'm ultimately describing a result of introspection, a structure of my experience which involves the sense of its universality.
But this sense of universality is also that which has us interpreting fire hydrants and clouds as also there for other consciousnesses. Since we live by such intuitions, I think it's fine to work from them and with them. Or rather we are going to in any case, so no need to exclude their consideration from philosophy out of a fear of their vagueness or uncertainty.
Re "meaning"? If so, yes, that's obviously the case, because it's not a text string or sound or anything like that. Meaning is something inherently mental, and it can't be made into something else or third-person observed. You can third-person observe text strings and sounds. You can't third-person observe meaning. This is a major part of my point.
I'm not worrying about anything except perhaps people making universal proclamations that aren't right, that amount to telling other people that they're doing something that they're not in fact doing, or that amount to telling people that they're "wrong" merely for being unusual.
Quoting macrosoft
C'mon, man--are you being serious? These are kind of dumb questions that don't reflect that you understand what I'm saying very well. For example, re the comments I made earlier about locations. "In which cubic millimeter" would make it seem like either you didn't really read those comments, or you didn't at all understand them. If you're not being serious, let's be serious. If you can understand Heidegger, you should be able to understand the relatively simple stuff that I'm typing.
Quoting macrosoft
They tell us.
Do we know it with certainty? No. Of course not. But you shouldn't be worrying about certainty period.
Quoting macrosoft
I very well may not. For one, I have an expectation that if we're doing philosophy, people are using terms "literally"--that is, per one of their conventional definitions, unless they specify otherwise. So I take it that you literally mean "shared," so a la possessing the same thing (whether at the same time or one after the other), or a la the "show and tell" sense, etc.
Maybe you only mean something like what I'd call "understanding" or more colloquially, "feeling like you know what someone is saying/talking about" or whatever. That would be fine, but I'd prefer that we call it something other than a term that I believe is not the case in a "literal" sense.
I don't think you'll get much out of this reading group by simply hewing to this position and then measuring everything in the PI against it. The point here is to understand what and why Witty says what he does, not contrast every section with Terrapin's pet theory of meaning. Nobody is here to engage with the latter.
Haha!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IABRgZH12YA&feature=youtu.be
Just saying ...
And I agree. Where have we left off at?
Yes.
As per your suggestion, I am trying to focus on the first seven remarks
(1) "In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands."
One thing to keep in mind is that Wittgenstein will attempt to break this correlation:
word = object (= meaning)
In both directions. Not only will he try and show that words don't correlate to objects (which is relatively easy), but he will also try and show that 'words' themselves are not natural 'units' of meaning. In other words, he's not attempting to replace 'objects' with something else. He's trying to undermine the idea that one needs words to 'equate' to anything at all in order for meaning to be expressed ('meaning to be expressed' as distinct from 'for words to have meaning').
(2) "Augustine does not speak of there being any difference between kinds of word ... the remaining kinds of word as something that will take care of itself."
Just a quick orienting remark: pay close attention to Witty's focus on kinds (and 'sorts'). The notion of kinds of words, kinds of questions, sorts of things, plays a vital role in the PI. The attention to kinds is inseparable from his understanding of the role of grammar, which will because super important in later discussions.
(3) "Well, I assume that he acts as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere" (italics in original).
This ties back (forward?) into the comments I made about §19: note the distinction between 'act' and explanation: that explanations 'come to an end' in 'acts'. This will also be super important later, but for now, it's worth noting as an indicator of the importance of questions of regress (and putting a stop to it) that will rear their head all through the PI.
question, and command?—There are countless kinds: countless different
kinds of use of what we call "symbols", "words", "sentences". And
this multiplicity 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. (We can get a
rough picture of this from the changes in mathematics.)
Here the term "language-game" is meant to bring into prominence
the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form
of life.
Review the multiplicity of language-games in the following
examples, and in others:
Giving orders, and obeying them—
Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements-
Constructing an object from a description (a drawing)—
Reporting an event—
Speculating about an event—
Imagine a picture representing a boxer in a particular stance. Now,
this picture can be used to tell someone how he should stand, should
hold himself; or how he should not hold himself; or how a particular
man did stand in such-and-such a place; and so on. One might (using
the language of chemistry) call this picture a proposition-radical.
This will be how Frege thought of the "assumption".
Forming and testing a hypothesis—
Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams—
Making up a story; and reading it—
Play-acting—
Singing catches—
Guessing riddles—
Making a joke; telling it—
Solving a problem in practical arithmetic—
Translating from one language into another—
Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.
—It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language
and of the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and
sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language.
(Including the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.}
The argument might be put this way. To learn how to understand meaning requires learning some rules. However, there are multiple sets of rules, corresponding to the variety of different ways that words are used. Determining which set of rules is applicable, in a particular situation (context), is required to learn language. We cannot appeal to a "set of rules" for determining which set of rules, because we'd fall into infinite regress of needing to determine which set of rules is applicable. So the argument appears to be that this ability, the capacity to choose a particular set of rules as applicable in a particular context, cannot be taught through ostension, as a set of rules.
If I have represented the argument correctly, I would be interested to hear some opinions as to whether or not this is an acceptable position. I believe that Terrapin Station, for one, disagrees with the position.
It would be helpful to everyone if you referred to the text where you believe he makes this assertion.
Rather, the point of the early passages are to establish the differential nature of ostension (in contrast to a 'linear' understanding of ostension); i.e that the 'same' ostensive act (pointing at 'this', say), can play different roles depending on the use to which ostension is put. There is no one kind of thing that ostension always picks out, but always the possibility of a variety of kinds of things (or put differently: in principle, there is always the possibility of a one-to-many mapping between ostension and what is 'picked-out', and never a simple one-to-one mapping between them):
§6: "With different instruction the same ostensive teaching of these words would have effected a quite different understanding."
§28: "an ostensive definition can be variously interpreted in any case."
The 'enemy' here is still Augustine, who can be read as still hewing to the one-to-one model of ostension. The question opened up by the differential nature of ostension, however, is this: given that ostension is just pointing, and that such pointing can refer to many different things, how can we know what an ostensive act is 'really' pointing to (If I point to a red pocket square, am I pointing out it's color? It's shape? Its fabric? Its texture? The fact that it is a pocket square? Something to wipe a stain with? All or some of the above in combination?). §29 onwards begins to address this question.
Sorry, I've jumped ahead a little bit, toward what I consider as the "conclusion" of this part of the text. He discusses very explicitly, the relationship between rules and the play of the game, at 31. He builds toward the "conclusion" at 32, 33, that if we learned language through ostensive learning, as described by Augustine, it would be necessary to already know a language in order to learn a language. At 32 he describes this as a foreigner learning a new language, and suggests that this is all that Augustine's description is good for.
Quoting StreetlightX
I don't like to have to be nitpicky, but "rules" are implied by Wittgenstein whenever he refers to "games", as he clearly understands games as consisting of rules. This is quite evident from the very first page of the book
At this point, #3, he explains that Augustine's description of language is descriptive of only a part of overall language use, as if when someone was asked to describe what a "game" consists of, they gave a description of what a "board game" consists of.
I do agree, that at this point it is not evident whether Wittgenstein believes that all games consist of rules, but he does consistently mention the word "game", and talks about various language games. This word, "game" implies through most forms of common use "rules". And the talk of various language games implies various sets of rules. So even when he is not mentioning "rules", nor does he explicitly state "all games consist of rules", rules are implicit in his mention of "games", due to the common understanding of the word "game".
Of course there is a way of using "game", if someone is "playing games with us", in which "rules" are not necessarily implied. But that's another issue, perhaps for later, as there is no evidence that Wittgenstein's use of language is a matter of him "playing games with us". That would be a form of deception.
What I aim to get out of it is to explain why Wittgenstein is wrong. Ideally that would help some other folks understand why he's wrong, but if people aren't interested, that's fine. They don't have to pay attention to me.
I don't read any philosophy by being submissive to it, and I think it's bizarre that anyone would--it's completely against the whole spirit of philosophy. I read it critically, where I expect authors to say things that are accurate, well-supported, well-argued, etc. A lot of my activity as a reader is to enter into a dialogue with the text, and to offer challenges to it. That's what I'll be doing, and it's what I do as a matter of course when I read any philosophy.
For me to agree or disagree we need to clarify just what learning amounts to. If learning is the idea of someone giving something to you wholesale, where you don't have to do anything in order to gain it (sometimes people seem to have that, or something close to it, in mind with "learning"), then no, I wouldn't disagree that it's impossible to learn language solely through ostension.
After all, on my view, it's impossible for anyone to third-person observe meaning, and any language isn't much of a language sans meaning.
If learning, however, includes the notion of figuring things out on one's own via deduction, contemplation, etc., in response to presentations that are made to one (which is what learning should imply in my view), then yes, I'd disagree that it is impossible to learn language solely through ostension.
No problem. I was referring to quoting another text. As you’ve pointed put the relevance for myself and others that’s great :)
Isn't it clear that learning is not a case of someone simply giving you something. This would make the learner completely passive, when surely the learner must be an active participant. If the learner is completely passive, then learning cannot be totally ostensive because nothing accounts for the learner's ability to receive what is given.
Quoting Terrapin Station
So this would be a more accurate description of learning, in my opinion, making the learner active. If the learner is active, in what you describe as sorts of thinking, then this accounts for the learner's ability to receive what the demonstrator is giving. But if this is the case, then is learning properly attributed to the ostensive activity, or to the thinking activity of the learner? And even if it requires both, isn't this just another way of saying that learning requires something more than simply ostensive demonstration? It requires active thought on the part of the learner as well. So even in this case it is impossible to learn language solely through ostension, because the right sort of thinking is also required.
As I just said, "sometimes people seem to have that, or something close to it, in mind with 'learning'."
Re your second part, you then go on to treat "learning" as if it might refer to something completely passive, lol
Are you serious? I guess not, judging by your use of "lol".
I don't see how we have such opposing conclusions. Let me make a simple deductive argument out of your premise concerning active participation, and you tell me how you disagree with the premises I propose. Learning a language requires active participation by the student. Active participation by the student is something other than ostensive demonstration. Therefore learning language requires something other than ostensive demonstration.
Or do I misunderstand what you are saying altogether?
Would you say that it's impossible to learn anything, regardless of how limited we make it, via ostension? For example, would you say that it's impossible to learn which coat your wife counts as her "cold weather casual coat" via ostension?
I would say that it is impossible to learn anything solely via ostension. Ostensive demonstration is an activity which is completely carried out by the instructor. And, as you indicated, learning requires active participation by the student in the form of different sorts of mental activity, thinking. If the sole means of learning is the ostensive activity, then the student is absolutely passive in the act of learning. So it would be a false description of what learning is, to refer simply to the ostensive activity, without accounting for the active participation of the student.
I believe that this is why Wittgenstein argues that St. Augustine's description of learning language through ostensive activity assumes that the student already knows a language. We have to account for the student's capacity to interpret the ostensive demonstrations, and if the student already has the capacity to interpret, then the student must already know a language.
So if we're defining things so that it's impossible to learn anything solely via ostension, why would we even ask the question in the first place re whether it's possible to learn a language via ostension?
The same thing would then also go for learning via demonstration, explanation, etc.
Of course, in that case, it would seem that maybe we're using an odd definition or description of the term "learn," because normally we'd say that we can learn some things via demonstration, via ostension, etc.
Quoting Terrapin Station
That observation wasn't brought up as a definition. Why anybody would ask the question is because there are experiences with language that do not seem to be about agreeing upon definitions before the talking begins. There is that language game but there are others.
The answer to that is quite obvious. Augustine had described language as being learned by ostension. So the question "is it possible to learn a language via ostension?" was asked, because the proposition that this is how language is learned was already made by Augustine. Wittgenstein was exploring the truth or falsity of this proposition, hence asking that question. He seems to have demonstrated that this is an incomplete description of how language is actually learned.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Sure we might say that we can learn some things, like language, through ostension, but as Wittgenstein demonstrates, this is a type of falsity because it is an incomplete description of how we actually learn those things.
Go back and take a look at #2, #3. Augustine's description of how we learn language is incomplete in a similar way to if a person who was asked to describe what a game is, described what a board game is. The description, of learning through ostension only captures a part of what learning a language is, but it doesn't capture the entirety of it.
Now consider this quote from #30:
This is the problem, if ostensive definition is a matter of assigning names to things, it is revealed that we must already know something in order to learn by ostension. So we cannot really capture the nature of learning, what the process of learning involves, by simply referring to ostension, because ostension requires that we already know something. Therefore ostension cannot account for the learning of this, what we already know which is required for ostensive learning. And this, what we already know prior to ostensive learning, plays a large role in learning language.
My tangent with Metaphysician Undercover involved clarifying a definition.
Do you believe that Augustine would have said that learning implies being given something wholesale where the person receiving what was learned is entirely passive in the process?
That's conflating the notion of knowing something with the idea of learning a language.
§30: "One has already to know (or be able to do) something before one can ask what something is called. But what does one have to know?"
- which in turn leads, once again, to the importance of kinds. In order for ostension to 'work', one must understand what kind of thing is being pointed out by means of ostension. §31 will employ a spatial metaphor, speaking about a "place" that must "already [be] prepared" in order for ostensive explanation to function effectively. Witty also refers to kinds as 'roles':
§30: "An ostensive definition explains the use a the meaning a of a word if the role the word is supposed to play in the language is already clear." (my emphasis)
Two things are important to note here. First, the question of kinds (or roles, or 'places') are intimately related to use: §31: "[ostensive explanation] informs him of the use only if the place is already prepared": that is, only if the kind of thing being pointed out is understood 'in advance'. This, in turn, sheds vital light on what Witty means when he speaks of use: to know how to 'use' a gesture, is to know what kind of things it points out. The same holds, mutandis mutatis, for the use of words:
§31 "We may say: it only makes sense for someone to ask what something is called if he already knows how to make use of the name" (my emphasis)
This is the second important thing: the connection to sense. The idea is that ostension can only make sense when understood as picking out a kind of thing; contrapositively, ostension is senseless without an understanding of the kind of thing it is pointing out. This is one reason why the question: 'it is possible or not to learn language only through ostension?' is so wrong-headed: there is no such thing as 'only though ostension': either ostension is constitutively coupled with an understanding of kinds, or it no longer even makes sense to call something an ostensive act.
Sense, use, kinds. These concepts and the articulation between them can be said to be the themes that preside over these sections - if not the whole of the PI to come.
I didn't get there yet (I think I only went through 25 above), but I don't agree that ostensive language-learning would involve anything like "correctly identifying kinds." Ostensive language-learning works via the learner simply assigning some mental association between what they take to be pointed to and the word in question. The learner will make adjustments to what they took to be pointed to in light of further behavior--including additional ostension. (And we could limit it to additional ostension.)
So tokens, rather than kinds, in your opinion? Or rather, singular, non-general(izable) things?
First, I'm not saying that ostensive learning of language would amount to "correctly identifying" anything.
The learner might think about what's being ostensively presented in terms of kinds, or tokens, or non-generalizable particulars, or anything imaginable. That's just the point. How the learner interprets it is variable. And learners will typically make changes in how they interpret it as they gain new ostensive demonstrations, other new experiences, or think about it further, etc.
No, I believe that Wittgenstein most likely misrepresents Augustine's position, creating a straw man, though I haven't checked the context of that passage. It is a useful straw man though because many people believe that ostensive definition is the foundation of language, and Wittgenstein demonstrates that this is very likely not the case, as there are other elements required which could be more fundamental than ostension.
Notice that in the quoted passage from Augustine, he refers to the intention of the teachers, and that after he learns words, he can express his desires. What Augustine is missing here, and what leaves him open to Wittgenstein's attack, is the desire of the student to learn. This is the other half of the ostensive definition, the other thing required, as we have been discussing, which leaves ostension itself insufficient. One must have the desire to learn, as this is what inspires the student to engage in those necessary activities we discussed.
You'll see, following StreetlightX's analysis, that the learner's half of the ostensive equation, this desire to learn, manifests for Wittgenstein, as the capacity to differentiate kinds. But there is another whole side to this, which is the capacity to distinguish individuals. So we could use Wittgenstein's own analogy against his own position. The capacity to differentiate kinds is only a part of what one needs to know for ostensive learning, just like board games are only a part of what "games" are. Ultimately, I believe any such description needs to be replaced by the more appropriate "desire to know".
Quoting Terrapin Station
Don't you think that this is a valid conflation? To "know" something as commonly defined in epistemology requires language. If it is the case that it is required that we know something, in order to learn a language, then the common epistemological definition of "know" is incorrect and misleading.
I agree that Augustine wouldn't say that learning implies being given something wholesale where the person receiving what was learned is entirely passive in the process. But also it would be odd if Wittgenstein thought that Augustine was saying that. As I mentioned, some people seem to talk about learning/teaching as if they see it as being given something wholesale where the person receiving what was learned is entirely passive in the process, but it strikes me as a weird (and kind of Aspieish) misunderstanding of what most folks have in mind with "learning"/"teaching".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Haha. No, i wouldn't say that any conflation is valid. I don't see knowledge as requiring language, even if we're talking about propositional knowledge.
The phrase "correctly identifying" has not so far been used by either me or the passages we're up to in the PI, so I'm not sure what you're responding to here, or why it's in quotes. As for this:
Quoting Terrapin Station
The problem is that ostension, by definition, is always demonstrative, and demonstratives are always of something. Pointing to 'this' is always demonstrative of something (else): X is an instance of [a color/shape/texture/size/etc]. It is demonstrative even if it simply is 'the thing I am talking about' (*point* "that is what I am talking about"; which can be read: "the role occupied by what I am talking about is that"). One would not be pointing otherwise. In other words, ostension is by definition inseparable from generality, regardless of what is 'imagined' (of what is 'thought about'). Witty even refers to the difference in kind between the grammar of imagination and meaning in the boxed note of §35, noting in particular that "It is only in a language that I can mean something by something. This shows clearly that the grammar of “to mean” does not resemble that of the expression “to imagine” and the like" (my emphasis).
[As a curious historical note, Hegel famously begins the Phenomenology by making this exact same point: that terms like 'this' and that' can only ever capture generality, and never singularity, as a matter of principle (although he draws somewhat different conclusions: "It is as a universal too that we utter what the sensuous [content] is. What we say is: 'This', i.e. the universal This; or, 'it is', i.e. Being in general. Of course, we do not envisage the universal This or Being in general, but we utter the universal; in other words, we do not strictly say what in this sense-certainty we mean to say. ... The same will be the case with the other form of the 'This', with 'Here'. ' Here' is, e.g., the tree. If I turn round, this truth has vanished and is converted into its opposite: 'No tree is here, but a house instead'. 'Here' itself does not vanish; on the contrary, it abides constant in the vanishing of the house, the tree, etc., and is indifferently house or tree. Again, therefore, the 'This' shows itself to be a mediated simplicity, or a universality." (Phenomenolgoy of Spirit, emphasis in original).
That was the second time I used the phrase by the way. I didn't use it to indicate that I was quoting anyone. It was in quotation marks because I wouldn't say there is anything that counts as "correctly identifying," so it would be " so-called." I was basically suggesting it as what there was maybe an attempt to get at or suggest.
Quoting StreetlightX
For one, this sounds like you're saying that we couldn't point at something or someone and utter a proper name. But that can't be what you're saying. But that's separable from generality.
I'd be interested in anything from Routledge.
Indeed it isn't. Which is why names are not demonstratives.
Okay, but then what you're saying isn't very clear, starting with the fact that proper names for particulars are separable from generalities.
Re "demonstrative" in the sense that you're using it, you can't be saying that we can't ostensively present proper names, because we obviously can and do.
How are you connecting "employ that proper name in a role" (not to suggest that I'm agreeing with that--we'd have to define it better) with "inseparable from generality"?
What does that have to do with proper name ostension and the comment you made about generality?
(Again not that I agree with Wittgenstein there, but that's another issue)
So re generality and its complement you weren't making a type/token distinction?
Sure, so re generality and its complement you weren't making a type/token distinction?
Wouldn't it have been easier to just answer that?
That is the way that PI is written, scattered and not formed into a coherent whole. If a companion provided us with a coherent whole it would be a faulty interpretation.
Quoting Terrapin Station
That's the force of Wittgenstein's argument against Augustine though. He argues that Augustine's description of learning through ostensive definition is wrong because it only provides a partial description. As well as ostensive demonstration, the student must also already know how to do something, distinguish kinds of usage, and this in itself is an important part of language. So he argues that the person already has an important basic understanding of language prior to being able to learn through ostensive definition. This understanding, is a knowing how to do something, which makes the student active in the ostensive learning. So it is only by removing the student's active participation in ostensive learning that Wittgenstein has an argument against Augustine. So this is how he presents Augustine's position, as if the student is passively receiving ostensive definition. I would say that it is not so much Wittgenstein's intention to attack Augustine's description, but to use the obvious inadequacy of Augustine's description, as a platform to launch into his own position.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Conflation is a form of synthesis and there is no law of logic which says that it is an invalid form of synthesis. Any claim that such and such conflation is invalid would need to be justified with an argument. It doesn't suffice to simply dismiss someone's position as a "conflation" because "conflation" on its own does not imply any illogical, or invalid procedure.
I'm asking about your comment there re "inseparable from generality."
You said x is an instance, presumably in the sense of an instantiation, a token of a type. And i was assuming you were using "demonstrative" in this sense: "a word or morpheme pointing out the one referred to and distinguishing it from others of the same class"
So were you not making a type/token distinction there re generality (in distinction to things that are not generalities)?
But arguing that it's wrong where it turns out that you're simply misunderstanding the conventional connotations of the term?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It would be up to you to argue that the two supposedly distinct concepts or terms are the same thing.
Yeah, that's what I was asking you. The problem is that "ostension is inseparable from generality" seems very obviously wrong (as do many other things you said and that you quoted from Wittgenstein). I don't recall if Wittgenstein actually said "ostension is inseparable from generality." If so, if you were basically just quoting him, we can look at that passage again. Maybe there's some way to read "ostension is inseparable from generality" that would make it not obviously wrong, but that's why I'm asking you about it.
It's been explained though. It's unfortunate you don't understand I guess.
Well via a lot of other comments that were obviously wrong (hence my "as [are] many other things you said and that you quoted from Wittgenstein"). I prefer to tackle one at a time if possible. (Because as we can see here, it's difficult enough to resolve just one.)
Quoting StreetlightX
All meaning is from a particular space and time period. So if that's sufficient to count as indexical, language is indexical period.
Quoting StreetlightX
So, if by "general," we mean something like "doesn't have a particular. relatively fixed use, but could be applied to anything (within certain constraints, at least)," then (1) when we're talking about a particular individual learning by ostension, this is trivially false (because for example, an individual can learn a proper name via ostension, and that individual may from that point forward ONLY use that proper name for the particular thing in question), though (2) if we're trying to talk more broadly, any term could be applied to anything--it just depends on the individual in question (which is part of the reason that all language is connected to particular space and time).
Quoting StreetlightX
So as an additional requirement on indexicals, we can say (which is closer to the conventional sense of them) that they're words that are used for referents that change based on particular perspectives, where more than one perspective can obtain in the same area at the same time (for example, how "I" and "you" work in Engligh during a conversation), where the referents in question are not necessarily even the same type of thing ("this" and "that").
BUT, it's definitely not the case that ostensive learning consists exclusively of indexicals in that more precise sense. Indexicals in this more limited sense would be a very small percentage of what anyone would learn ostensively.
Hence should we be aware of the significance the blue and brown books may have on this discussion?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_and_Brown_Books
Oh dear. Yeah, not worth continuing when this is the level of response :( Please learn some basic grammar terms before continuing :smile:
"Oh dear" is one thing we can agree on. ;-)
You don't seem to get Wittgenstein's point. Describing the learning of language as an ostensive exercise, with or without the "conventional connotations" associated with the term, is an incomplete description of what is involved in learning language. This is because a large part of what constitutes knowing how to use language must be already known before the ostensive exercises can have the desired effect.
So if we separate in analysis, what "ostensive definition" actually refers to, from the "conventional connotations" associated with the term, and find that the "conventional connotations" refer to already having some knowledge of how language works, then we can dismiss "ostensive definition" as being an insufficient description of how we learn language. The "conventional connotations" are actually hiding the fact that one must already have an understanding of some aspects of how language works, before ostension can be effective, and therefore hiding the fact that the process of learning language cannot be adequately described by ostension.
Quoting Wallows
No, I actually think this is irrelevant. The discussion here is of the "Philosophical Investigations" specifically. An author, in philosophy especially, often changes one's mind as time passes, so to bring in other writings, as if they are part of this book, would probably be more confusing than helpful. For the same reason, if we discuss a philosophical text, we do not seek to reference the author's rough copy, unless maybe there are some specific problems to clear up. If the topic of discussion here was the evolution of Wittgenstein's philosophy, that would be another thing.
Please help me recall, anyone, as I have poor memory.
Did Wittgenstein not prep students with the blue and brown books used in his lectures before moving onto the Investigations?
As I pointed out way back, if by "learning" we don't mean that odd notion that has it that one is given something wholesale where the person receiving it is entirely passive in the process--and Augustine surely isn't using "learning" that way, and neither am I, then I don't agree with Wittgenstein that learning a language can not be done via ostension. I wouldn't say that it always is learned via ostension (well, at least not on a more restricted definition of ostension; on the broadest definition, I might say that), but I'd say that it could be.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That's not what I'm referring to. I'm referring to the fact that conventionally, "learning" doesn't connote being given something wholesale where the person receiving it was entirely passive in the process. It rather connotes something where the learner was an active participant, where learning necessarily involved them thinking about what they're hearing, etc.
That second sentence in no way implies "already having some knowledge of how language works."
None of them were (officially) published during his lifetime.
Yes, I stand corrected. If memory serves me right he didn't even want the blue and brown books published.
Some aspects of language use are learned via ostension, that is not the issue. But since some aspects of language use are required, as already known, for ostensive learning to proceed, then learning language is not done entirely through ostension.
I don't see where you disagree. You agree that the student must already know how to do something, in order for ostension to be successful. So this cannot be learned through ostension. And ifsome necessary parts of language are learned through ostension, then this, what the student needs to know in order for ostension to be successful, is a necessary part of language. Now, if this, what the student needs to know in order for ostension to be successful, cannot be learned through ostension, and it is a necessary part of language, then language cannot be learned solely through ostension. What part do you disagree with?
Quoting Terrapin Station
I know that's what you are saying, but it's irrelevant. Suppose that the activity A is required to learn X. Also, the activity B is required for the activity A. It would be false to claim that reference to activity A provides a complete description of learning X, because we must also refer to activity B as well. The fact that referring to "activity A" necessarily implies, or "connotes" activity B is irrelevant because activity B has not been included in the description, therefore the description is incomplete. A description is explicit, not implicit. In order for the description to be complete, activity B must be described.
I disagree with that claim.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
They have to be able to observe and they have to be able to make a mental association between things like the sound the demonstrator is making and what the demonstrator is pointing to. That doesn't require that the person has a language already.
Just where do you believe that a language prerequisite is entering the scenario, and why do you believe that?
We already agreed on this, that the student must already know how to do some different things, for ostension to be successful. I believe you called it mental activity. This aspect of language use, which you called mental activity is not learned through ostension because it is required for ostension. Why disagree now?
Quoting Terrapin Station
I find it hard to believe that an intelligent person like yourself, has such a hard time to understand this. It's like you have a mental block. My claim is not that it is necessary that "the person has a language already". My claim is that in order for a person to use a language, it is necessary that the person know something which cannot be taught through ostension. Therefore we cannot provide an adequate description of what it means to learn a language simply by referring to ostension, because we need to describe how the person knows how to do this other thing which is not taught by ostension, but is required for ostension.
If you want to bring up any commentators, then feel free, as far as I'm concerned. But I am not the leader of this group.
I didn't agree that they have to know anything about any language.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Teaching/learning refers to the activities of both the teacher and the student. To say that the activities of the student are something additional to learning/being taught is to not undertand the terms teaching/learning.
Hence the whole tangent about Augustine not referring to only one side of that by his comments about learning, and hence my comments saying that if Wittgenstein is arguing that "learning" refers to only one side of it, and not what the student is doing, too, then Wittgenstein doesn't understand the conventional sense of the term "learning." It would be rather comical if that's all this is amounting to--that Wittgenstein doesn't understand the conventional sense of a term. But to say that learning doesn't include the student thinking about the material, etc., is to not understand what learning refers to. When we talk about learning something ostensively, we're not imagining that the student is mindless. That's not what that term refers to.
I’d say more of a “pace setter” if anything? If you wish to refer to a companion go ahead. The thing is I don’t have a copy of one and even if I had the pdf I am not willing to read one atm. Others maybe so any input you have give it.
I’ll try and ask some questions about the “ostensive” soon enough.
In the meantime perhaps we ca move the reading on to 30. Most people seem to be ploughing ahead so may as well keep it up.
I said 1-7 to start so people could find their feet if they needed to. From now on I reckon looking at around 20 sections oer week is a good enough pace (pauses if needed.)
TO ALL
It would be very, very helpful if people could note the part of the text in each reply/question/musing. This way anyone new to the topic can easily see what you’re referring to and add to the discussion.
Note: At the moment the discussion going on above is engaging the text around the 20 mark?
It's not a matter of knowing anything about any language. That's not what we've been discussing, you're changing the subject. A person can know how to use language without knowing anything about any language.
Quoting Terrapin Station
The point is that the activities carried out by the student, which are necessary for the student's ostensive learning, are not learnt through the ostensive learning. Therefore they are "something additional" to what is learnt by the ostensive procedure. If you can't understand this then so be it.
I think it was a polite suggestion; and a welcome one.
I’m certainly no authority on Wittgenstein, but I do like trying to take on tasks where I can facilitate discussions.
I think I already stated that it helps to make explicit what W means when he talks about “language.”
It is clear enough from the outset that W is referring to “language” as the medium of communication we’re using to talk here. He is not saying “language” and referring to mental processes; he does however mention lingual thought as using language.
In this sense one, or both of you, seem to be using the term “language” as suits your position and not how W presented it. That could be a huge problem for others reading if you don’t make your use explicit.
For reference I believe W says (12-16) that we don’t need to know the word for “hammer” to understand the use of a hammer. Language doesn’t equip us with knowledge of an object simply by naming something. He thrn goes on to remark about announced words in given settings with “Slab!” having more meaing intent to it than a singular object because it is an exclaimation - here there is the difference of written and spoken language AND social context (maybe it is worth noting that in German if a word is Capitalized then it is regarded as a noun; which means when Germans read they use a marker to resolve some problems of misinterpretation by the reader.)
It can be quite hard to sift through the dramatic play of words, colloquialisms and use of rhetorical speech. I believe it is in this W is laying out some of the problems of mannerisms in language and how certain we confuse speaking with thinking - that is debatable though; nevertheless it is something that made me pause when I first read this text and thought about sketchy nature of language and how words are infinitely tightly bound sentences/phrases/paragraphs which can be reduced in this way or that completely dependent upon the contextual terminological use (eg. If I say “This is bad!”, yet in another exchange say, “This is bad!”, there is no reason for you to understand what my intent is without knowing my attitudes to some degree; “bad” can mean “good”, as in “badass.”)
W then goes on to mention something of symbolism and categories (yet I don’t think he explicitly says “categories”?) when talking of colour, shape and number (23 - ref. to language/words as “tools”, 28, 29 to 35 - talk about numbers, colours and shapes). Here he mentions that pointing out a group of items and annoucing something doesn’t make explicit what the word annouced means (could be “group,” could be “five,” could be “circular,” could be “yellow,” etc.,.) it is from here that categories are formed by cross referencing what is said in reference to what items. With numbers we do not cmoe up with the term “number” prior to the words “one, two, three, four, ...” because it is impossible to do so (or is it?) because we must first have the word items at hand order to talk about them and then categorise them as a group of “numbers.” Also, we don’t need a term for “number” to “count.” Words in this sense can be seen as nascent measurements of experience.
Sure, but in this case, it's not clear to me what difference that would make in either my argument or Metaphysician Undercover's argument.
I don't agree that having some of "what Wittgenstein means by 'language'" is necessary prior to learning language via ostension.
I suppose we could load "what Wittgenstein means by 'language'" in a way that it might matter, although the contortions needed for that might make it so that we might as well say "what Wittgenstein means by 'language being a necessary prerequisite'" in a manner that, if carried through wholesale for everyone, for everything they say, would disable ever taking issue with anyone about anything.
"Oh, well what Charles Manson meant by 'curing society' . . ." and so on.
Here's the question you asked:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The answer is yes, I disagree that it's impossible to learn language solely through ostension.
That the student knows or does something that's not itself language, prior to learning language via ostension, is irrelevant to the question. The question isn't whether it's impossible to learn or do any arbitrary thing that one might know/do only via learning language through ostension.
I don't think he mentions "categories" explicitly, but he is continually referring to types, and kinds of usage, as well as senses. So if we can divide language into different ways of using words, as per #23 quoted earlier, ( https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/230433 ) then an identified way of using words, as an identified activity, is implicitly a category. Consider what is then said at #24:
Keep in mind what is implied in the analogy at #2 #3, that a game is a type of activity which consists of sub-classifications, different types of games such as board games, etc.. Language is a type of activity which is sub-classed into activities such as those mentioned at #23. The act of "questioning" therefore is to proceed with a type of activity which is a sub-class of the overall classification of a type of activity called "language". Thus it is a particular type of language-game within the category of "language-game", like a board game is a particular type of game within the category of "game".
Quoting Terrapin Station
In order to understand what Wittgenstein is presenting, you need to understand how he is using "language". The word "language" for Wittgenstein does not refer to a thing which you can point to and say "that is language". It refers to a type of thing, and that type of thing is an activity, just like a game is an activity. So we cannot divide language into parts as if it is a physical thing, it gets sub-divided into different types, just like one subdivision of "animal" is "mammal", and a subdivision of "mammal" is "human being". These are types. Refer to the analogy at #2 #3. "Board game" refers to a type of game. Describing what a board game consists of does not provide a description of the broader category of "game".
What Wittgenstein demonstrates is that there is at least one type of activity, which exists within the broader classification of activities, called "language", that cannot be learned by ostensive definition. He identifies this type of activity as distinguishing types.
Quoting Terrapin Station
This is demonstrably false. Consider this true proposition: "one must first count to five before counting to ten". Now consider that a person learns how to count to ten. Counting to five is "not itself" counting to ten, but it is clearly not irrelevant to counting to ten. Counting to five is "necessary" for counting to ten.
So when you dismiss what is necessary for ostensive learning, as irrelevant to ostensive learning, you are making the same mistake as one who would dismiss counting to five as irrelevant to learning how to count to ten.
It's irrelevant to whether we can ostensively learn language.
Re the counting analogy, it's the same as saying that the student can learn to count to ten without already knowing how to count to ten.
If you wanted to ask, "Is it possible to learn how to count to ten without knowing how to count to five first," you'd need to actually ask that.
You asked if it's possible to ostensively learn language. The answer is that yes, it is.
If you want to argue that it's not possible to ostensively learn language, you'd have to say what one can't learn ostensively that is language.
Your comments in the following section are an incoherent mess, but I'm trying to avoid some other big tangent: Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Keep in mind, by the way, that we can't go back to pretending that "(ostensive) learning" is positing a student who is a blank slate, who is just passive, etc., because then we're simply saying that Wittgenstein is forwarding an argument based on a ridiculous misunderstanding of what people are referring to with the term "(ostensive) learning."
As necessary for ostensive definition, it is necessary for learning language. Therefore it is not irrelevant. Likewise, counting to five is necessary for counting to ten, therefore it is not irrelevant to counting to ten.
Quoting Terrapin Station
That's false, counting to five is something other than counting to ten.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Can you not read? I stated that as a true proposition: "one must first count to five before counting to ten". If you doubt the truth of this proposition, and want to ask if it's possible to learn how to count to ten without first learning how to count to five, and challenge the soundness of my argument, then be my guest. Perhaps you might make a case.
Quoting Terrapin Station
This has already been stated, we've been through this countless times. There are specific mental activities which are required to be performed by the student in order that the student may learn by ostensive learning. These cannot be learned by ostension. But they are a part of language, just like counting to five is a part of counting to ten.
No one is claiming "that is language". You clearly misunderstand what Wittgenstein means by "language". It is not a thing you can point to and say "that is language". "Language" is a word which refers to a certain type of human activity, with a multitude of sub-types, just like "game" is such a word.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Right, you're trying to avoid the point which Wittgenstein is making, so that you may carry on with your nonsensical misunderstanding. Either pay attention to the book, or excuse yourself from the discussion. But to dismiss the theme of the book as a "big tangent" is unacceptable behaviour. If it all appears like an incoherent mess to you, then perhaps you ought to forget about it.
No, it's irrelevant to the question of whether you can learn language ostensively that the student is doing non-linguistic things mentally, because "learning language ostensively" doesn't imply that the student is NOT doing non-linguistic things mentally.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Saying that they can't learn a language ostensively without already knowing something linguistic is the same as that.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How ridiculously ironic that you're asking that. In other words, if you want to know something more speciific, such as, "Is it impossible to learn a language ostensively without first blah blah blah" then you'd need to ask that. (Though note that the "blah blah blah" might be something that we're referring to by "learning language ostensively"--you'd need to make sure that it isn't.)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What part of language are we talking about?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We're not saying something so stupid as, say, "One has to be conscious to use language. Therefore consciousness is part of language, and one doesn't learn how to be conscious ostensively. Thus, language can't be learned ostensively," are we? Because as I noted, that would be really, really stupid.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
When Wittgenstein makes an incoherent mess rather than you--and he will often enough, I'll comment on that as I go through the book. I don't want to get into some other big tangent that's your doing. If you were quoting Wittgenstein, then fine, I'll get into that tangent.
Just as an aside, by the way, I should again note that I'm not arguing that language necessarily is learned ostensively (again, though, it would depend on just how broadly we're defining ostension). I'm simply arguing that it's possible to learn language ostensively.
That's nonsense, as a necessary part of language this cannot be said to be "non-linguistic".
Quoting Terrapin Station
Why is that stupid? If one must be conscious to learn language, then consciousness is a necessary part of language. It may be a matter of stating the obvious, but stating the obvious is not being stupid. People sometimes ignore the obvious, or even, for some reason insist that the obvious is irrelevant, perhaps because it is obvious. Therefore it is sometimes necessary to state the obvious, and insist on its relevance by demonstrating this logically.
It is that other type of behaviour, (your type of behaviour), of dismissing the obvious as irrelevant, which may be described as stupidity. If we were discussing what a human being is, and someone said, it's a living being, this is not stating anything stupid. It is stating the obvious. But if you were to insist that being alive is irrelevant to being human, that is really really stupid. So it really looks like you are a splendid display of stupidity. Why don't you shut up and get with the program?
21
One can think about language, not just meaning, but grammar, etc., in different ways, where tone of voice, context, etc. make a difference. No obvious disagreement there.
22
Every assertion is (or "contains") an assumption? No.
"But 'that such-and-such is the case' is not a sentence in our language"
What? What language is he talking about? That's definitely a sentence in English. Is he talking about the limited "Slab" language he was setting up? Not sure what the idea is there.
"And if I write, not 'It is asserted that . . . .', but 'It is asserted: such-and-such is the case', the words 'It is asserted' simply become superfluous."
No idea what big difference the "that" is making to Wittgenstein there.
"Would this shew that every statement contained a question?"
No.
I'm not sure I understand much of the following passage, especially not the part that follows the first parenthetical:
Part of my not being sure of that is that it seems like maybe Wittgenstein is suggesting that he has a pretty superficial approach to music, if performing a score is that different from "meaning" a sentence to him . . . at any rate, I'm not worrying about this passage at the moment unless it turns out to be important for something else later.
This part of the book is seeming like a lot of rambling to me, by the way.
23
Definitely agree with the first paragraph there.
. . . There's that "form of life" metaphor again. Not fond of that. But otherwise still no problem with anything in this section or 24
25
Some other animals pretty clearly have types of languages, and probably many others do, too, where it's just not clear to us that the phenomena in question are functioning like languages. So I don't agree with this section, but it's probably not going to matter.
26 - 27
"One thinks that learning language consists in giving names to objects"
Which one thinks that?
Seriously, though, who would think that's all it is?
Wittgenstein wasn't under the mistaken impression that ostensively learning language was just this, was he? If so, why?
28
Sure, ostensive demonstration can be interpreted in various ways, which is why multiple examples are necessary for someone to figure out things like "two." The student makes associations, formulates concepts, performs abstractions, makes deductions, etc. That's all part of what we're referring to by learning in general, including ostensive learning. Those things are not themselves language, by the way..
29
The way you ostensively demonstrate something like "two" is by showing two of different sorts of things and saying "two" with them. So two people, two donuts, two trees, two shoes, etc. Sesame Street does this sort of thing all the time. The person observing this figures out what's in common in all of the examples, and thus they arrive at the abstraction "two."
"For the word 'number' here shews what place in language, in grammar, we assign to the word."I think that's much harder to do, and I'd say that's one of the last things that "number' there would do.
"That is to say: misunderstandings are sometimes averted in this way."
Sure, sometimes they are, but that's not the only way you can do that.
But is there only one way of taking the word "colour" or "length"?
Of course, not, and re meaning per se, there are more meanings for any term than there are people. (Meaning is different than definitions.) There are going to be misunderstandings, different definitions, etc. no matter what we do, by the way. Again, the way you demonstrate this sort of stuff ostensively is not by additional words (that haven't been demonstrated), but by examples that the observer formulates concepts, abstractions, etc. in response to.
30
"So one might say: the ostensive definition explains the use—the meaning—of the word when the overall role of the word in language is clear."
That's certainly one thing that ostensive demonstrations can do, but it's not the only thing they can do.
. . . oops, the pdf version of the book has something missing here, probably not much though . . .
"Could one define the word "red" by pointing to something that was not red?"
You can help someone understand a term by negation like that, but if there's no positive demonstration they're unlikely to get any word (unless there are some unique examples that are escaping my imagination at the moment).
"But it might well be asked: are we still to call this "definition"?"
I wouldn't normally call it a definition, but I don't think it matters that much if we do call it that. It has some features of definitions, especially limiting what the term refers to.
"One has already to know (or be able to do) something in order to be capable of asking a thing's name."
Sure, and if we literally mean asking then one definitely has to know language in order to be able to do that. BUT, one does not have to ask or be capable of asking a thing's name in order to learn language.
Again, only in the trollish way that consciousness is "linguistic."
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Because for one, no one is saying that consciousness is learned ostensively, even though they might say that one can learn language ostensively. So arguing against "language is learned ostensively" by arguing that consciousness isn't learned ostensively is the worst, most trollish sort of straw man.
You're trying to change the subject again. We were discussing specific mental activities required for ostensive learning, not consciousness in general. Obviously you've reversed who the troll is here, just like you reversed where the stupidity lies by claiming that the one who states the obvious is stupid for stating the obvious, rather than recognizing that the stupidity belongs to the one who claims that what is obviously relevant is actually irrelevant simply because it's relevance is obvious.
I've committed myself to the reading groups that I started, which are the Naming and Necessity one by Kripke, and The World as Will and Representation Vol. I by Schopenhauer. I just progress slowly on reading those books as I tend to analyze things in a slow and laborious fashion. I don't like how we are progressing with this current reading group. My preference would be to have a companion, such as Marie McGinn's, The Routledge Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and have that supplement whatever questions may arise.
I don't have much to contribute to this discussion, and since I'm not the leader of this reading group I don't feel compelled to post anything or direct how we go about addressing each part of the book.
That's my take.
Cheers.
I also added Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigation by David G. Stern...
I plan on participating in those, too, and I'll be doing the same thing there that I'm doing here. The only direction that I think would be handy would be if we're all reading and commenting on the same passages at the same time--more or less how album listening threads go, where folks comment on each tune as the thread-starter brings it up and makes his/her own comments.
No one really seems to be taking the initiative to do that, though. It's not necessarily something easy to find a good balance for. You don't want to do too much at a time, because then it starts to feel like homework to folks, they get behind, and they abandon the thread. But if it's too slow, folks lose interest that way, too.
Probably a couple pages per day is a good pace for a discussion thread. Three pages per day might be too much, especially if people are trying to participate in multiple threads simultaneously. One is probably too slow.
Thanks for these links, by the way.
First, I think you people are going to fast. Some of this material takes a lot of thought, and if you don't think it takes a lot of thought, then you definitely don't understand it. You really need someone who knows the material well to guide you through it. Otherwise, you'll end up with a bunch of cliches that will distort Wittgenstein's thinking. I've spent years studying the 90 pages of OC, and only then can I say I have a decent understanding of Wittgenstein's thinking in terms of knowing. I only say this because I've compared my thoughts to what other philosophers have written on the subject, and it lines up well.
If you don't have a philosophical background, and you start with Wittgenstein, that's like trying to learn calculus without learning the math leading up to the study of calculus. Wittgenstein's works are some of the most difficult to understand in all of philosophy. Even people who have a good background in philosophy get confused about his ideas. In fact, many of them are confused.
My summary of the PI in my thread on Wittgenstein is very simplistic. It doesn't come close to doing justice to his writings in the PI. My comments on OC are much better, but still need work.
Anyway, those are my thoughts for what they're worth.
:up:
Can you show us the way?
Then can you advise us on which companion to use? Or PMS Hacker?
The best book on Wittgenstein's life is Monk's Ludwig Wittgenstein.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07922L4HW?tag=opr-mkt-opr-us-20&ascsubtag=1ba00-01000-ubp00-win10-other-nomod-us000-pcomp-feature-scomp-wm-5&ref=aa_scomp#customerReviews
We're all fucked in the head. Isn't that what Wittgenstein demonstrates in PI?
Quoting Sam26
Seeing as you don't seem to have anything useful to add, I'd say your thoughts aren't worth very much. But we're all fucked in the head anyway, so who cares?
Thanks for mentioning it again. I just bought a paperback for a cheap 14 greenbacks. It arrives Friday. I'm busy with my other reading groups on Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation and Kripke's Naming and Necessity. I'm enjoying them both and hope I can find time to address the Investigations thread here. It's definitely a tough book to analyze given its format and lack of apparent narrative, which can only be seen (IMO) through a resolute reading of the Tractatus and then the Investigations. There are of course reoccurring themes in the Investigations from the Tractatus if one is observant enough.
Quoting William Manninen
That pretty much sums it up.
I think there is some merit to that professed belief; but, it is common knowledge that Wittgenstein wanted the Tractatus to be published alongside the Investigations. Even if on face value it doesn't seem that Wittgenstein has no continuous narrative between the two works, that simply cannot be true.
What do you have to say about that, if you don't mind me asking?
In the PI he still believes that the logic of language is important, but the investigation of that logic is different, it's more of an a posteriori investigation. The logic in the PI is seen in the language-game, and the grammar and rules that make up the language-game. It's also seen in how we use words in social contexts. These social contexts (language-games) reveal the logic behind the use of the words or propositions. Our actions as seen in a form of life also reveal the logic within the language-game.
On forums people will shout and battle it out.
I am not “leading” because there is no chance I can stop anyone from posting or readin ahead. I can try amd ask people to stick to the text (and have) but then there is the egotistical exchange.
Looking at the Routledge edition there is nothing much there that does more than the text itself. It is NOT a complex text at the start. Anything I have said is to reference the text and expand a little on what W says. For example I like the term “ostensive” as something to apply to non-verbal thought (I haven’t said this because it is irrelevant.
At the moment comments on 1-30 are welcome ... no doubt people will ignore this and plough ahead with pet theories. Maybe they’ll take the hint? Maybe more than two people will respond? Maybe people have been put off?
We’ll see :)
Note: Why doesn’t the Routledge edition refer to what I referred to regarding “numbers” and “counting”? Seems strange and shows that the guides don’t cover everything. If reading a book for the first time I generally don’t use a guide EVER! Only once have a done so because I never got hold of the original text. Guides are better read after in my opinion (but it is my opinion.)
I'm not familiar with the Routledge edition.
Actually, the way Wittgenstein is using "ostensive," as in "ostensive teaching of words (PI 6)," is not in connection with non-verbal thought, but in connection with how words are taught, and he thinks this view is very primitive, viz., it doesn't account for how we learn many words. For example, I may point to a cup while saying the word cup as I teach a child how to use the word. However, there is nothing to point to when using the words nothing or the, we learn how to use these words in other ways.
Think of the "ostensive teaching of words" in reference to the primitive language-game at the beginning of the PI.
I attached some other supplementary reading books in my previous comment here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/231811
Let me know what you think.
I know what he meant by “ostensive’. That is why I said it was a personal thought and irrelevant to the context of this thread.
It was an example of what I am NOT doing here.
I like what it says at the start of the Cambridge one. Like I’ve already said I believe in reading the text first and not relying on guidebooks or the summations of others. Often I’ve found that I make some happy mistakes that spark new ideas or branch my thinking into directions the author doesn’t take.
The problem of using references as first time guides is quicker, but I feel you may lose something by blinding yourself from your own thoughts under the weight of other views.
I’m not going to look at any of the references you’ve give properly and I’m not encouraging anyone else to either. I’ve read PI once quickly and now this opportunity has arrived I’ll slowly go through it again and once I’m done with a section and expressed my thoughts (if I choose to) I’ll then, and ONLY then, refer to the guides.
I’m only taking on the role because I aim to improve my “people management” skills (or lack of) as well as hoping to see many different takes on W expressed/discussed whether they are deemed right or wrong.
Says MU of the chap who has added the most, and the most cogent, stuff on Wittgenstein in this forum...
Come on! Is this merely a forum for pointless sniping?
Would it hurt to refrain from making useless posts ... like this one?
The discussion is Philosophical Investigations. Add to it or leave please; hoping for the former :)
One element of difficulty specific to the PI though, is that it develops its arguments in two contrasting temporal keys: on the one hand, the arguments develop over long stretches of discussion, where nascent points are slowly and deliberately teased out bit by bit. There's a need to keep passages in mind that might have long ago been read. This contrasts with the PI's otherwise very tight argumentative structure were points are taken up and dropped very quickly in the space of a single subsection or two, and which themselves require close attention in order to grasp them.
The fact that the book largely operates at these two different scales at the same time is not easy to square with our usual habits of reading, and it can be hard to coordinate the two with each other. Still, it can be done, and it doesn't require some kind of kabbalah-like esoteric hermeneutics that often and damagingly gets associated with the work. Just a bit of hard work, nothing more.
In terms of this little reading group, I'd simply suggest to be careful about getting to caught up in local arguments and particular subsections without trying to relate them to the global whole of the work. It's far too easy to get stuck on one or another example without trying to understand its place in the larger narrative (and there is a narrative arc or arcs to the PI, fragmentary looks notwithstanding). I would also add that I agree with Sushi that for those reading the PI for the first time it might not always be beneficial to track secondary readings along with it. It's hard enough to keep the double tempo of the book in mind without adding a third.
Some of us have more free time than others in the present context, so our paces vary. The tit-for-tat develops in the wait period as a wasting of time. It's a natural manifestation of this type of forum, a social medium which allows the commentator access 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If it stays relatively on topic, it's a harmless digression.
But if you do not read the text thoroughly you'll have difficulty distinguishing the personal opinion of the commentator from the material of the text. This is a very important, and difficult aspect of interpretation, to exclude your personal opinion, box it out of your interpretation, and failure to do this leads to a faulty commentary. This is why secondary sources ought to be approached with caution, and I like your attitude toward such, read them afterwards, after you've developed your own interpretation. At this point one might carefully analyze the places where one's own interpretation varies from the interpretation offered in the secondary source, in an effort to determine why such a variance has occurred.
Quoting I like sushi
I'm a little bit unruly myself, so I'll mention a passage at 31. It's just outside your arbitrary divide of 30, but very relevant to the material of 1-30, which we all seem to have a grasp of by now. So please don't expel me from the group for going out of bounds.
This passage, I find to be very complex and difficult, and my inclination is to read it and skip along without understanding it, as I am inclined to do in many passages from Plato, where too many ideas are intermingled in a small space on the page, transposing to a short time in the mind. This passage seems like it was intended to say something very important about how we learn a word, (though he says "name"), which is not really an ostensive learning, but I can't quite put my finger on what exactly is being said. The key point in the analogy which is hard for me to grasp and apply, is that the chessman corresponds to the physical word. And, the (ostensive) demonstrations referred to are meant to demonstrate the use of the word, as a physical object, analogous to the use of the chessman. But at the end, he explicitly refers to "name" as if the physical word is supposed to be a name. Here's the passage:
Is there anyone here who is ready to tackle this passage, and render clear the meaning of the closing statements? I get lost at the second paragraph, the second imaginary scenario. because it seems like the person in the scenario already knows how to use words, yet is also being shown words for the first time. Or is this meant to be like translation, the person is being shown new words which correspond to the ones already known? If so, how could a name be translated?
Quoting Banno
I explicitly stated that I am not going to lead this discussion, so I am not trying to guide anyone. If anyone decides to follow me and ends up screwed in the head in accordance with Sam26's experience, that's not my responsibility.
Well, or maybe like the patronizing leading the patronizing. Which is what the entire board is like sometimes. Why we get a parade of people through here who seem to believe that they're the only one with a philosophy background, with philosophy degrees, with philosophy teaching experience, with a philosophy publishing history, etc. I don't know, but we do.
Obviously not everyone is going to have the same background, but we seem to get the old "you must not have a comparable background to mine if you have such different views than I do, if you have such a different disposition than I have," which you'd hope would be almost immediately dissolved in anyone with an actual philosophy background, given the variety of views and personalities found under its umbrella, but such poor reasoning seems to persist.
Again, why are we doing "reading group" threads where no one is leading them via directing just what we're going to discuss as we systematically go through a text? What sort of reading group is that? Heck, so far the Schopenhauer and Kripke threads have seemed to amount to "make some comment about the book if you want to.". That's not a reading group thread.
We should be saying, "Okay, tomorrow/in two days/whenever we'll be discussing sections/pages nn" and then the leader starts the discussion on the day in question and gives the next target at the end of his/her post, with everyone else then giving their comments, getting into discussions about that content, etc. And then if the leader is going too fast or too slow for most participants, they make the appropriate adjustments.
Why are we not doing that?
I've participated in a lot of reading group and a lot of listening group threads. (Re the latter, where we do something like go through a musical artist's entire discography song-by-song.) In my experience people are usually cool with sticking to the "chunk" being presented as it's presented.
Well, and for some of us, our sometimes crappy memory. :razz:
Quoting StreetlightX
Yeah, sometimes I get the (extremely distasteful) impression of some philosophers treating Wittgenstein more or less like Jesus.
Reel back 5-6 pages and look? I cannot help if people ignore what I propose. I said to discuss the intro and 1-7 and you started jumping ahead.
This isn’t a classroom so you don’t have to follow what I propose.
Should dictate everything? If so then let us reel back and look at what I proposed. If not continue with looking at the first 30.
You all have a week (until Dec 6) then we’ll move on from 8-30 (until Dec 14) then leave it to the New Year to discuss reading up to around 50-60 mark.
Anyway, that’s as much as I’m willing to do. None of that means hold off from reading the whole text.
If you started leading us and suggested that, I missed it and apologize for that.
Quoting I like sushi
Yeah, people dont have to, but that's how these sorts of threads work best, and in my experience participating in a lot of them, people will play along if they are really interested. Some of the music threads I've participated in where we systematically went through an entire discography stayed structured and focused for over two years, as we went through large discographies song by song or album by album. If those hadn't been run like a "classroom" more or less they wouldn't have worked.
The only thing that I'd suggest is that only doing through section 60 by New Year's is a pace that would make this thread last a few years to see it through to the end of the book, so we might want to go a bit more quickly than that. PI is about 250 pages. So if we try to average a page per day we can get through it in a little over eight months.
Quoting I like sushi
What you call 'categories' here, and what Witty variously refers to as the 'place' that is 'prepared' for a word prior to the ostensive defintion of something, or 'kinds of word', is pretty much, imo, the most important thing that is being set-up in these early sections. It begins to lay the groundwork for what is maybe the most important concept developed in the book: that of grammar. In fact §29 marks one of the first appearances of Wittgenstein's use of the term 'grammar' in the PI (the second appearance, in fact - the first was back in §20, but it was not used there in the quasi-technical sense that it first has here in §29):
"For the word “number” here shows what place in language, in grammar, we assign to the word. But this means that the word “number” must be explained before that ostensive definition can be understood. The word “number” in the definition does indeed indicate this place - the post at which we station the word." (my bolding).
The 'place' of a word is its place 'in grammar' - which is used almost as a synonym for 'in language'. That language and grammar are here co-eval and essentially equivalent indicates the importance that grammar plays in Wittgenstein's conception of language as a whole. This theme will only get more important as we continue. In any case, I will simply reiterate again the importance of thinking in terms of 'kinds of words' and the 'place(s) prepared' for the use of a word, which you capture here in your talk of 'categories'. Attention to this aspect of the work will clear up alot of what is going on in §31, which MU is struggling with.
The issue is true of “numbers.” You can point out the number of items and an understanding of “four” or “five” will come. Once these terms are established then, and only then, can the term “number” be applied. In this sense the “category” of number is set out after the use of them (ostensively.)
Whether we are referring to Wittgenstein's grammatical rules (which are important), or the more general idea of rule-following, as seen in the application of rules across a wider swath of language usage, rule-following is central.
Grammar is what makes the moves in language possible, just like the rules of chess make the game of chess possible. And just as the rules of chess permit some moves and disallow others, so also does grammar permit and disallow certain linguistic moves. This should be seen under the logic of use, but again keep in mind that the logic of use is broader than just grammar. It includes the various acts that occur in a language-game. For instance, the act of bringing the slab in Wittgenstein's primitive language-game, is also seen as part of the logic of use. Just as the rules of chess bring about the various moves in chess as part of the logic within the game.
It's also part of the nature of the rules of grammar to adjudicate certain moves as correct or incorrect. Again the parallel with chess rules. One can think of the rules of grammar and the rules of chess as more akin to commands to follow in order to play the game correctly. The rules are conventions, but they necessitate certain moves, i.e., if you want to play the game correctly within the social structure.
I will just make general remarks here and there.
I’ve always liked the view of language as a game. What is magical about it to me is how play and language correspond.
If you think back to childhood when you played with a group of children you’d all establish certain vague “rules” to whatever game you were playing (or rather role playing.) Language is pretty much the same affair. We have to have some loose agreement about the “rules” yet leave enough room to accommodate new interpretations. None of us develop language by sets of dictated rules, it is a natural function. In this sense “grammar” happens naturally and it is only after it is established that we can spot the patterns and commonalities of the “game” we’re “playing.”
The rules are simply conventions. Conventions aren't correct or incorrect. It's not incorrect to be unconventional. If you're too unconventional in this case, people will have a difficult time understanding you, at least initially. What makes something count as a particular language or not is simply the conceptual boundaries that individuals have in mind for that language. In other words, simply "what they'll assent to call 'English' (or whatever language)"
Some conventions are correct or incorrect. One cannot simply use a word any way one likes, i.e., if you want to be understood. So there is a sense where we can say you are using the word cup incorrectly even though the word cup is a matter of convention.
No, they are not.
Quoting Sam26
Sure, it will be more difficult to understand someone if they're very unconventional. I mention that in the post you're responding to.
Quoting Sam26
Yeah, in the sense where you endorse argumentum ad populums, conformity, etc, and you mistake your opinion for a fact.
So let's see if I understand you correctly. The rules of chess are a matter of convention, i.e., they could have been otherwise. But according to you it's not incorrect for me to move the bishop like a queen. The problem is that your use of incorrect and correct is out of the norm, as such, one has a difficult time understanding what you're saying, because by implication even in the use of these words (correct and incorrect) has no correct or incorrect use. If that's true why are you arguing that I'm incorrect? Your argument, if you follow it to its conclusion leads to an absurdity.
I'm not arguing that you're using any words incorrectly first off. I'm not saying anything about words per se.
And yes, most people use "correct"/"incorrect" in a manner where they say that some word usage is correct or incorrect.
The whole point is that there's no normative force, in the sense of some overarching, nonconditional "should," in the mere fact that something is a convention. Yes, x is a convention. Well so what? You don't have to care about the convention. You're not getting anything wrong by not following a convention. You're not getting factual matters wrong when you use language unconventionally. You're simply not following the convention. We can name that whatever we like, but all it amounts to is people trying to pressure others into following a convention, trying to apply normative force to encounrage conforming, and seeing conforming as something like a "trump card," just because there's such a drive toward it for some folks.
We could say that someone is using "incorrect" to simply refer to "you're not following the convention." However, "incorrect" almost always has a connotation of "you should (be following the convention)." Well, why? Why should anyone follow the convention? You could say, "If you want to be understood more easily" or something like that. They could say, "I don't care about being understood more easily--I'm understood just fine; it's to my liking." (and maybe the example was something like, "Ain't no big deal should I take Bobby with" or something like that--something that tons of folks will understand just fine). Still, people get bent out of shape about that. They want the person to want to follow the convention. They usually think less of people who don't follow the convention, as if everyone would ideally follow it, as if it indicates something about intelligence and education level and so on whether it's followed or not, etc. Why?.
I'd say "struggling with" is an understatement. I cannot find the coherency in the passage, how the different imaginary scenarios are supposed to relate to each other, and where the expression "Settle the name yourself" is drawn from.
I see how he moves in the earlier parts of the book, from describing different ways of using the same word (senses) at the beginning of the book, to the more general different ways of using language, after the reference to Frege at 22. At this point, he establishes that "language" as a type of activity, still consists of a multitude of distinct ways of using words (according to different purposes) Then, he returns to the very specific and very important part of language "naming". For reference, this is how "naming" was described at 15:
So at 29 it appears like it is implied that naming is a matter of placing a word into a role which has been prepared for it within language. Perhaps there is a thing and language provides the means by which a particular word would be required to label that thing. However, we can't lose track of what has just been painstakingly described, that "language" if analogous to "game", actually consists of a multitude of different language-games, different ways of using words. Language is a classification of a type of activity with a whole slew of sub-classifications. So there is a matter of positioning the word within the appropriate language-game. Therefore naming must not be just a simple matter of finding a word's place within "language" as a whole, but the more complex matter of determining the appropriate language-game, and the word's role within that particular game.
Now we get the complex problem of 31. At the beginning of the section, a word is a physical object, analogous to a specific chessman. At the end of the passage, the word appears to be a name. What is not obvious is the transition, how the word becomes a name. There is a number of different scenarios we are asked to imagine. 1. A person who has learnt the rules of chess but has never been shown an actual piece. That person is shown "this is the king". 2. A person who has learnt how to play the game without learning the rules. That person is shown "this is the king", assuming he is unfamiliar with the particular style of piece. 3. Someone is explaining the game, points to the chessman and says "this is the king, it can move like this...". That is my understanding of the scenarios we are asked to imagine, 2 appears to be a bit odd, but in each case I assume that the piece, the chessman being shown as "the king", is analogous to a particular word being shown in ostensive definition.
In the context of the sections we're talking about, the point to be made is something like: in order to point out red, we need to understand that it is a color - and not a shape, texture, or name (for example) - that is instead being pointed out. It can be put like this: to understand what is being pointed out by ostentation, one needs to understand two things, not one, and always both together: first, the 'actual' thing that is being pointed out - red, say - and second, the kind of thing that is being pointed out - in this case, the color (and not the shape, texture, name, etc). All these early sections are basically at pains to point this 'double understanding' out.
§30: "One has already to know (or be able to do) something before one can ask what something is called."
Quoting I like sushi
This is true as far as it goes, but it doesn't quite capture what is at stake in these sections. Notice, to begin with, that Witty insists on the reverse order of what you've said: to understand ostension we first need to understand the kind of thing it is (say, number), then we grasp what actual thing it is (the number 3, say):
§29: "Perhaps someone will say, “two” can be ostensively defined only in this way: “This number is called ‘two’.” For the word “number” here shows what place in language, in grammar, we assign to the word. But this means that the word “number” must be explained before that ostensive definition can be understood."
§30: "One has already to know (or be able to do) something before one can ask what something is called."
§31: "This [ostensive] explanation again informs him of the use of the piece only because, as we might say, the place for it was already prepared."
In all three cases here, what is 'prepared' and what is explained 'before' the actual ostensive definition is the 'category' - as you said - of the thing that is being pointed out. The 'category'' is not set out after the pointing out, but before. It must be 'prepared' before one understands that it is 'two' things that are being pointed out.
We certainly don’t arrive at the term “number” before we have the terms “one,” “two,” “three,” etc.,.
To make this as clear as possible:
If I point at three balls on the floor one red, one blue, and one green then say “pollydumdum” what is it you think I am saying?
You have no idea. You would have to observe me continue to play my “language game” and figure out whether I meant “balls,” “coloured balls,” “primary colours,” or any other possibility of which there are too many to list.
Of course if I used English and said “That is number pollydumdum,” I imagine you’d grasp my meaning easily enough. My, and I believe W’s opint being that words come into play in a necessary order because it is impossible for you to know what “pollydumdum” meant without first being equipped with the understanding of the word as a “number,” yet you could come to understand “pollydumdum” as a number once I persisted and gave other examples of numbers; where from I can then correspond to you my parsing of your word “number” only after the fact of presenting a select of numbers and likely some basic arithmetic too with use of writte symbols for complete clarity.
Of course “pollydumdum” could simply have meant “ostensive” or “pointing.”
I don’t see W’s purpose to be anything than to reveal problems. He certainly doesn’t offer up solutions merely pointing out some easily looked over issues of common parse and the use of language in philosophy (which I personally see as the mainstay of “philosophy” - the exploration of the possible limits of language.)
It is “conventional” to breath. Is it also “correct”? This is certainly deep, deep down underneath the Investigation. I don’t think we’re anywhere near going there just yet in any reasonable manner.
The “game” only works if people are willing to play it with you. If not then I’d say whether you believe you are “correct” or not no one will ever know nor care to - you can see where that goes.
Yes, but that's not what's being discussed. It's not about the term 'number', but the term 'two', in the example discussed:
§29: "Perhaps someone will say, “two” can be ostensively defined only in this way: “This number is called ‘two’."
And in this example, the understanding of number comes prior to the understanding of the ostensive definition of two. Witty is explicit about this:
§29: "But this means that the word “number” must be explained before that ostensive definition can be understood."
To be clear, we don't have a disagreement here. We're simply talking about two very different things. My point is only that the specificity of the example that Witty gives here is important, and that there's a reason he gives this example, and not the kind you offer (even though your example and the point it illustrates is perfectly correct). And that reason is because Witty is setting up the importance of kinds of words - of grammar, of the 'place' of a word in language, what you referred to as 'categories' - that your example, fine as it is on its own, does not capture.
I'll offer an explanation, but just to be clear, this is outside of the reading, it's based in personal opinion. There is a very peculiar relationship between universals and particulars which the human mind develops, that has the mind reciprocating back and forth from one to the other, in order to understand each of them. The understanding of any particular thing progresses by relating it to types, categories, and the understanding of the universals, types, categories, progresses through an understanding of the particulars. In your example here, "number" refers to a universal, a category of things. while "one", "two", "three" refer to particulars.
What I believe Wittgenstein is arguing is that in order to learn how to name a particular, this requires that one already has some understanding of the different types, universals, and the capacity to distinguish types. This is not to say that the person knows how to name types or universals, just to recognize them. So the temporal order of learning which W would be arguing, is that one first learns that there are different types of things, and actually learns how to distinguish different types, as necessary for, and therefore prior to learning how to name particulars. But this does not mean that the person knows how to name types, because this would come after learning how to name particulars.
This analogy might be useful. The conscious part of learning could be like the visible spectrum of wavelength. There is much learning which occurs outside the boundaries of consciousness, just like there is much electro-magnetic activity occurring outside the boundaries of sight.. When the conscious mind looks at "learn" it sees the #1 definition, "gain knowledge of or skill in by study, experience, or being taught", because that is the part it is actively involved in. However, there is a second definition, a broader definition which is simply "acquire or develop a particular ability", and this better captures the entirety of "learn". The conscious mind, in its bias, wants to narrow the definition of "learn", restrict what it means to "learn" in order to exclude that part which is outside of its domain.
Another important part of Wittgenstein's analysis in the PI that is not carried forward from the Tractatus, is the idea of a final analysis. I spoke earlier of the continuity of his thinking, but there are clearly ideas from the Tractatus that he rejects. And it's the idea of some final analysis, as if we can boil down philosophical ideas (generally speaking) to their constituent parts, which will reveal in very precise terms what we mean. This is seen in his example of the broom, as if seeing the parts of the broom will give us more insight into what a broom is (PI 47). The broom example is similar to what Wittgenstein was doing in the Tractatus as he analyzed language. He was trying to give a final analysis that explained how language worked in very absolute terms, and thus solve all philosophical problems. He did this in the Tractatus by giving us a method of seeing language in terms of what has sense, what is senseless, and what is nonsense. He supposedly gave us a way of seeing proposition is very absolute terms, with very specific boundaries.
However, the PI turns this analysis on it head, by showing us that much of what philosophers do in terms of an analysis is just the chasing after shadows. Shadows isn't the correct word, because shadows exist, a better phrase is, chasing after ghosts.
I do think we can take Wittgenstein's methods too far, as if clarity isn't possible, but clarity should be seen in a context. What's clear in one context, isn't clear in another. How we use the word reality in our everyday lives will not do in physics. Neither context of how the word reality is used, is THE correct use, both have their uses, and both can be correct given specific language-games. There is no final analysis of reality that give us perfectly clarity on every use of that word.
Many people, scientists included, do this with what we mean by knowledge, i.e., as if scientific knowledge is superior to every other kind of knowledge. It may be in many instances, but what it means to know is much broader than scientific knowledge. This misunderstanding tends to put science up as some kind of god when it comes to having knowledge. Don't get me wrong I think scientific knowledge has a rigor that we don't use in many other areas, but even this rigor is subject to sensory experience, as is much of our knowledge.
Given what Wittgenstein is doing in the PI, it cannot be fit into the kind of analysis that is seen in the Tractatus, and thus Wittgenstein cannot be seen as an analytic philosopher (in his later years) in the traditional sense. Wittgenstein is not giving some final analysis in the PI, or some dogmatic theory, but giving us a way of looking at language from a multitude of perspectives and contexts. He opens our minds wide, as opposed to looking at things from a very narrow perspective.
Not everything Wittgenstein said is correct, but this isn't the point. The point is the method, which is seen in OC as culmination of his methods in the PI, viz., a sustained treatment of what it means to know.
It's very important to juxtapose private rule-following with language-games, because one or more people can participate in a language-game, that has as its basis for meaning a privately held meaning. This of course goes against Wittgenstein's notion that it's logically impossible to have such a meaning, i.e., it has no foothold in terms of what it means to be correct or incorrect. This is also Wittgenstein's stance in On Certainty as he responds to Moore's propositions, viz., "I know this is a hand." The point is that people can establish language-games that reflect a lack of understanding in terms of what gives meaning to words. It follows from this that not all language-games reflect the correct use of words. So if you think that all uses in terms of language-games, are correct uses, then you would be wrong. The correct notion of rule-following must be linked to the language-game, or you will miss an important part of what Wittgenstein is telling you.
For example, some people use the word know in a way that reflects some private access, which then allows them to assert that X is true, or that X is justified. People do this all the time, even philosophers do it based on particular theories of knowledge. To further illustrate the point, I'll use a religious example. If I say that "I know X," and you ask, "What is your justification for knowing X," and I reply, "The Holy Spirit revealed it to me," then you would be falling prey to the private notion of meaning. However, if Wittgenstein is correct, and it seems obvious (at least to me and others) that he is, then this way of giving meaning to a word, be it knowledge or some other concept, is faulty, to say the least. Why? First, because there is no way of resolving what would count as being incorrect about such knowledge. Second, and this is closely related to the first point, rules cannot be privately established, i.e., totally isolated from social contexts. It's just not possible. Every notion of correct or incorrect, knowing and not knowing is part of a social construct, viz., a linguistic construct. There is no meaning to be had privately. Again, because it's logically impossible.
Finally, Kripke's skeptical argument about rule-following, which in some ways reminds me of the Gettier dilemma. Basically it's the idea that there is no way to know if Mary understands addition beyond a certain point, i.e., there is no way to know if she understand the rules as they are acted upon in public over time. Let' say that Mary has been doing addition as we understand addition up to 1000, but that after 1000 Mary does something much different, viz., she randomly adds 5 to every answer above 1000. It would seem to follow from this that there is no way for us to know that anyone is following any rule correctly, because at some point their actions may reveal something very different than what we normally mean by a word/concept.
So the skeptical rejoinder is that we can never be sure that anyone is following a rule correctly, since at a given point in the future, a person's actions may reveal that what they understand as addition, doesn't conform to what we publicly understand as addition. Thus, the notion of rule-following collapses as an essential part of our understanding of concepts. Why? Again, because there is no way to know if someone really understand a rule or not.
But, there is something very wrong with Kripke's skeptical argument, i.e., it assumes the very thing it's arguing against. It's circular. Here's the crux of the problem. In order for Kripke's argument to work, he has to be able to compare Mary's understanding of addition up to 1000, with that of Mary's understanding of addition after 1000. However, if there is no way to know, according to Kripke's skeptical argument that we are following a rule in terms of any concept (addition in the e.g.), then there is no way for Kripke to know if he is following the rules of sameness correctly. When he compares what Mary did at point X, with what Mary did at point Y along the time line, how does he know that he is applying the rule of sameness in the correct way? If what his argument is claiming is true, then it would apply to all concepts, even the very words used to express his argument. This is what Wittgenstein meant when he said that a doubt that doubts everything, is not a doubt, which is what Kripke's argument boils down to.
Why was Kripke's argument circular, because it assumes an understanding over time of the concept sameness. So it assumes the very thing he is arguing against. However, it's more than circular, it's contradictory.
That would require an additional step a la "and there must be a way of resolving what would count as being incorrect about such knowledge because . . . "
Quoting Sam26
That seems like a claim sans an argument for the claim.
My alternate claim is that there is no meaning to be had publicly. It's just not possible. The idea of public meaning is a category error.
I'd have to reread Kripke's arguments about this--it's been awhile since I read it, so I'm not saying that I agree with him or anything like that, but simply based on what you said here, all you have to do is appeal to the phenomenal data--Mary simply seems to be doing something different than what one (and others) are doing, per one's understanding. That doesn't require anything like "following the rules of 'sameness' correctly." And then you either can figure out what Mary is doing differently or you can not.
Again, the way that you can (and that people sometimes do) this (and red, etc.) ostensively is like this:
Let's say that someone points at a pair of shoes and says "two."
The student might think that "Two" is a proper name of the pair of shoes, or the term for what sort of thing it is a la "Ah, those things I put on my feet are 'two'," etc. (I'm not saying they do this linguistically, knowing terms like "proper name" etc.--but I have to this out in words for you to understand what I'm saying on a message board).
So they think whatever--maybe one of the things I explained above.
Next, the teacher points to two apples and says "two."
No, the student might think that "Two" is a proper name for the apples, too, or think that they're also called "two" instead of "apples," etc.
But the teacher goes on and points to two drumsticks and says "two," and two coins and says "two," and so on.
The student will eventually wonder what the things might have in common that's relating to the "two" sound. And most will eventually form a conceptual abstraction a la the number "two" to explain the sound being applied to all of those different things.
You don't have to know the word "number" for that. You figure out the concept of (a) number for yourself as you create your own conceptual abstraction for it.
You'd have the more overarching concept of "number" later, as you're shown 1, 3, 4, etc. and then you learn the sound "number" for 1, 2, 3, 4 etc.
I wouldn't say either. Breathing is not a convention (conventions are basically arbitrary behavior, things we make up, that people follow because others are doing it), and I wouldn't say it's correct/incorrect.
Since you're lurking around this thread Sam26, maybe you could give me your opinion on #31 of PI. It appears like Wittgenstein is suggesting that there is a way that one can learn how to play a particular game, or even a multitude of games, without learning rules. What do you think about this?
This is all well and good, until, of course, one pays attention to the specificity of Wittgenstein's example, which for reminders' sake, runs like this:
§29: "Perhaps someone will say, “two” can be ostensively defined only in this way: “This number is called ‘two’." (emphasis in the original)
The discussion that follows is in reference to understanding this utterance, where 'number' is a word specifically employed in the use of language to be understood.
In what way would you say that comment has any implication for my explanation of how we can teach particular numbers and the general concept of number ostensively?
Good thing you're participating in a discussion thread and commenting on posts then, genius.
Rule-following is an activity, and it's one of the activities that takes place in a game. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have learned rules or that rules have been stipulated in some way prior to the learning of the game. The same is true when you teach a child what the word cup means, the child doesn't need to know anything about a rule in order to learn how to use the word. The child observes, and probably already has some background of what it means to associate a word with an object. This is similar to the person in Wittgenstein's example (PI 31), where there is no learning of the rules explicitly or implicitly. Note though that the person has a background with learning other games, and as a result it makes it easier for them to figure out how the game is played.
This does not mean that once the person or child has learned to use pieces in a game, or has learned how to use the word cup, that they are not performing a social activity in accord with rules. Dogs can even learn to play simple games, and obviously a dog has no concept of rule-following or understanding of rules. However, the actions of a dog, in say a competition, is in accord with rules. The dog, child, or adult doesn't need to understand what the rules are in order to learn a rule-governed activity.
It's important to note that the person who is learning the game is already familiar with the kind of activity associated with rule-following. This is true without them understanding what a rule is, or being shown the rules, or learning rules.
This is part of what Wittgenstein, I believe, is saying in this passage.
Yeah, make sure to reply to a bunch of comments of mine then.
Especially when you're not interested in that.
I see how this is true, concerning how a child learns to use words, that the child could learn how to use words, without learning any rules, and even develop a sufficient vocabulary this way. But I don't see how this could be the case for learning any sort of game. Anyone trying to play a game, having learned in this way, would inevitable stray out of bounds of the rules, and would have to be told the rules, and told to stay within the boundaries of the rules. So it would be impossible for a person to learn to play a game without learning the rules, because any practise would involve straying beyond the bounds of the rules, and therefore being taught the rules. In other words, the others engaged in the play of the game would not allow the person the necessary practise to learn a game, without teaching that person the rules.
Perhaps if Wittgenstein took the more general activity "play", and said that a person could learn to play without learning rules, this would be more acceptable, because "knowing how to play" doesn't imply knowing rules, like "knowing how to play a game" implies knowing the rules. However, since we see that one can learn to use words without learning rules, wouldn't it be a more appropriate analogy to say that learning a language is like learning how to play, and learning the more complex parts of language, like the various logical systems etc., in which rules are involved, is like learning how to play different games?
Suppose now, that the person in this scenario, of whom Wittgenstein says "in another sense he is already master of a game", is not really master of a game at all, because he knows no rules. All he is master of is play; he knows very well how to play. Someone says to him, "this is the king", in order to bring a rule into his play, teach him an actual game. The "place" which is "already prepared", as Wittgenstein says, is the person himself, already knowing how to play, and now ready to commit to some rules. That is the place which has been prepared for the rule, by the practice of play.
§31 continues the theme, already developed previously, that an ostensive explanation requires knowing something about the kind of thing that is being pointed out:
§31: "The words “This is the king” (or “This is called ‘the king’”) are an explanation of a word only if the learner already ‘knows what a piece in a game is’. That is, if, for example, he has already played other games, or has watched ‘with understanding’ how other people play - and similar things". (emphasis in the original).
However, one thing that might be missed - because people have been anticipating alot - is that §31 is actually the first time in the PI that Wittgenstein actually begins to discuss 'rules' explicitly at all. So far, rules were mentioned only back in §3, where, interestingly, Witty actually objects to characterizing games in terms of rules, and says that such a characterization is a 'restricted' one that doesn't capture the generality of games. To recall:
§3: "It is as if someone were to say, “Playing a game consists in moving objects about on a surface according to certain rules . . .” - and we replied: You seem to be thinking of board games, but they are not all the games there are. You can rectify your explanation by expressly restricting it to those games."
That ought to put us on alert to the fact that rules are not - so far at least - crucial elements in Wittgenstein's conception of games, and hence, language. This is something that will be developed here in §31 even more. §31 beings by characterizing a situation in which in order to understand a specific ostensive act ("This is the king”), one must know the rules before hand. What is being illustrated here is again, the need for prior knowledge before ostensive explanation can 'work':
§31: "When one shows someone the king in chess and says “This is the king”, one does not thereby explain to him the use of this piece a unless he already knows the rules of the game except for this last point: the shape of the king". So far, so good.
Importantly however, this prior knowledge, while it can be of rules, is not necessarily or always of them. This is what the second paragraph (which begins "However, one can....") aims to bring out, which, among other things, aims to show that rules are just one kind of 'prior knowledge' needed for ostensive explanation to function: "And in that case it is so, not because the person to whom we give the explanation already knows rules, but because, in another sense, he has already mastered a game." There is 'another sense', quite apart from the knowledge of rules, in which one can have the prior knowledge necessary to understand ostensive explanations.
As with §3, Witty is here circumscribing (limiting) the role or importance of rules as necessary elements in the understanding of ostensive explanations. While acknowledging their necessity in some circumstances, the appeal to rules does not exhaust all of them. The rest of §31, which doesn't discuss rules at all, simply goes over some of the same ground as before: the need to have a certain kind of knowledge before ostensive explanations can work.
At the outset of the book, I would strongly object to this interpretation of #3. At that point there is no reason to interpret that Wittgenstein implies games could be played without rules. In this phrase, “Playing a game consists in moving objects about on a surface according to certain rules . . .”, the reference to board games is "on a surface", not "according to certain rules". So it's a real stretch of creative interpretation to claim that Wittgenstein might be implying here that a game could be played without rules. In common usage, "game" implies "play according to rules", and what is implied by W's phrase is that a game could be played in ways other than "on a surface". Your interpretation would appear as completely unwarranted..
However, as I stated earlier, there is a sense of "playing games", like "she is playing games with us", in which one plays without rules. But these are private, unconventional games, and the phrase carries with it a connotation of trickery, foolery, or even deception. If we take away the necessity of rules from game play we no longer have a "game" in the common sense of the word, we have a "game" in this other sense.
Quoting StreetlightX
OK, #3 did not convince me. As I said it's a stretch of creative interpretation to think that Wittgenstein is implying that a game could be played without rules. However, #31 appears to be explicit. So, if Wittgenstein is using "game" in this way, he is using, or conflating, two distinct senses of the word. He is using "game" in the sense of a board game, or the game of chess, in which "play according to rules" is implied, and he is also using "game" in the sense of a private, unconventional game, where there are no rules, but this sense of "game" implies trickery, or deception.
With Wittgenstein it is very important to distinguish which sense is intended by his use of common words. Failure to do this will produce equivocation in one's interpretation. And this qualifies as misunderstanding. So for instance, he might use "game" as "play according to rules" in one paragraph, and in the very next paragraph, use "game" as "play without rules", and if the interpreter fails to recognize that these are two distinct senses of "game", the result is equivocation within the interpretation, misunderstanding. Moreover, we cannot combine these two to make one sense of "game" because "play according to rules" and "play without rules" are logically incompatible.
Quoting StreetlightX
Yes, I very much agree that this is the actual point which Wittgenstein is making. The reference to games is an aside, a diversion or distraction. One might say that he is playing games with us with this distraction, but that in itself is a real living example which serves to prove the point. He's very crafty, isn't he?
We might consider two aspects of game-play according to the two distinct senses of "game". One is the actual play of the game, in which one acts according to the rules. The other is the strategizing which is still part of the play, but there are no rules to it. There is a relationship between the two, such that when we are using language and want to give something a name, a label, there is an aspect of following rules, and an aspect of strategizing. This seems to me, to be the reason for the line "Settle the name yourself".
.
There is no textual evidence to support arbitrarily cleaving the phrase in two. Speaking of 'stretchs of creative interpretation'. Nothing in the rest of the post refers to the PI either, so is entirely neglectable.
Games are going to keep on cropping up here, so I think it's worth mentioning some games without rules: sandcastles, cowboys and indians, trains, bricks, dollies, ... not that we cannot make some rules for any of them if we want to play making rules, indeed making the rules is often a large part of playing dollies, but there is no essential need, such that if it is not rule bound it is not a game.
*spoiler alert*
More generally, Wiki's family resemblance entry gives a sneak preview of the forthcoming demolition of definitive meaning as the universal pattern of meaning.
Quoting unenlightened
OK, I just thought I'd get some clarification on this matter, seeing as we're supposed to be reading this text together, it's good to have agreement on interpretation. To me, the common use of "game" is to play according to rules. That's my natural interpretation of "game". But if rules are not implied when Wittgenstein makes an analogy between games and language use, referring to "language-games", he uses "game" in a sense which neither implies that the game player is following rules, nor does it imply that the game player is not following rules. One "language-game" might be played according to rules, but another might not be played according to rules.
So in the above example when the learner is learning how to name objects, and this is referred to as "language-games", we ought not interpret this as the learner learning rules. The learner might be playing a language-game which does involve rules.
It assumed there are rules. We can certainly “play a game” without knowing the rules; which maybe where some confusion lies in your exchanges above (on one or both sides?).
By this all I mean is that when we “play” we have some aim - be it clearly stated or otherwise. As we play we come to understand certain techniques and methods that yield subjectively (and intersubjectively) “good” results. The more we develop the game the more refined and defined the rules become. The creation of rules is pretty much what “play” is about.
Rules are abstract after all not real. We don’t continue to play a game of chess to its conclusion if the house is burning down around us - reality aways draws us any from the rigid nature of abstract, unyeilding rules. If the game is a bore we adjust it; thus creating a new field of play to explore.
As it stands, §3 is more indicative than rigorous. It should be taken, at this point, as nothing more than a flag to look out for - one over the question about the articulation of rules and games, and the possibility, still to be explored, that the former do not exhaust the latter. Anything beyond that is going far beyond where we are with the text atm.
§32 brings the discussion so far back to Augustine briefly, and is thus useful to measure the distance travelled between §1 - the beginning of the book - and now. Recall that Witty's initial gripe with Augustine's theory is that it had no place for different kind of words:
§1: "Augustine does not mention any difference between kinds of word."
In the distance between §1 and §32, we've leant why this matters: without an ability to distinguish between different kinds of words, it would not be possible for ostensive acts to make sense. §32, in turn, implies that it is part and parcel of learning a language that we learn how to make such distinctions. Witty's complaint against Augustine, now extended here, is that Augustine takes for granted that someone can already make such distinctions:
§32: "Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a foreign country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if he already had a language, only not this one."
This is the importance of the contrast between the child, and the foreign language learner: both are learning a language, but the child has to learn something the foreign speaker does not - the ability to distinguish between different kinds of words. The child has to learn (at least) two things, the foreigner speaker, just one. The critique of Augustine then, is that he takes the foreign language speaker as his model, and not the child; or rather, that Augustine has no place in his theory for the child.
Quoting Sam26
If you're still lurking Sam26, please notice that this passage is completely inconsistent with what our interpretation has provided for us, up to this point. For Wittgenstein, as explained so far in PI, a language-game is not rule based. Rules are not what makes play of the game possible. Therefore grammar (as rules) cannot be, for Wittgenstein, "what makes the moves in language possible", as you state above.
Quoting I like sushi
In Wittgenstein's description of "game", up to this point in the text, I don't think that rules are assumed as necessary to a game at all. That is what StreetlightX describes above. Rules cannot be assumed here. if we can play a game without learning the rules, then rules are not necessary to playing a game.
Quoting StreetlightX
Wait a minute. Rules have barely been mentioned to this point, as you astutely noticed. However, games have been consistently mentioned, even to the point of a description of what constitutes a "language-game", at #7, quoted above. Therefore the thrust of the sections we've been discussing has to do with the relation between ostension and games, not the relation between ostension and rules. He has developed a relationship between ostension and game play, something deeper than an analogy, as it is suggested that ostension is a type of game play (language-game), not "like" game play, as "analogy" would suggest. And, as our brief discussion above indicates, he has not developed a definite or firm relationship between games and rules, therefore he has not developed a firm relationship between ostension and rules. Nor has he even attempt to develop such a relation except the brief suggestion that one can learn a game without learning rules. But "rules" is still a phantom term here waiting to be defined within this schema.
I Like Sushi, as you are our professed leader, what do you suggest as our next section, somewhere around 45?
Sorry, by sections we've been discussing I simply meant the paragraphs in §31, which gave rise to the above discussions about games and rules. As far as the PI goes, as pre-§31 has mostly been concerned with establishing that a certain kind of knowledge is needed for ostensive explanations to function effectively. I still think it's much too early and speculative to be discussing Wittgenstein on games and rules.
I reckon pushing onto 50 is best.
Given that the holiday season is pressing in on us I am looking to reread up to around the 100 mark by new year and then to 200 by end of January - just so you know.
In relation to "rules", I agree that it is too early for a discussion of Wittgenstein's position, but in relation to "games", I do not agree. "Language-games" have been extensively mentioned, beginning with the explicit definition at #7, where he describes ostensive learning as a language-game. So I think it is important to grasp at least a minimal understanding of what he means by "game". As you know, I was completely confounded because to me "game" means "play according to rules", and this is how I interpreted "game" in the sense of ostension being a language-game. But you and unenlightened set me straight, that this is not what Wittgenstein means by "game". Playing a game does not necessarily imply knowing rules, and I misinterpreted W's use of "game".
At #7, ostensive definition is called a game, a language-game. Being a game, I mistakenly understood this "language-game" as something which must be played according to rules. I thought that one must already know some rules in order to play the language-game of ostension, being a "game". That's why I got confused at #31. But I now see that Wittgenstein intends ostensive learning to be a game which one knows how to play without knowing rules (as per 31). I now anticipate that he is probably setting this up as the type of game by which one learns rules, learns how to follow rules, or some such thing. We will see.
It's true that §7 does provide a minimal definition of a language game -
§7 "I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the activities into which it is woven, a “language-game."
- elaborated slightly in §23 -
§23: "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."
- but, these definitions are simply stipulative and (so far) shed little light on the specificity of why Wittgenstein calls them 'games' (and not, say, 'language-excercises' or 'language-activities'). Without an explicit discussion of games - which has not happened, but soon will - it's still the syntagm 'language-games' - taken as a whole - that is the matter for discussion, and not 'games' as such.
§33 marks a new turn in the argumentation of the PI. From here till roughly §36, Witty will begin to discuss the role of 'experiences' in the understanding of ostensive explanations. Before getting to that, it's important to recap a little, as Witty himself does.
Let's recall the main problem being addressed: that ostension is differential, which means that the same ostensive action can point out many different things, which in turn, raises the question of how we can tell which one of the many things is being pointed out (how can an ostensive explanation be 'individuated', as it were?). Witty's position so far is that one needs to have a 'mastery over the language game' - an understanding of kinds of words, or grammar - in order to answer this question.
§33 tries to address an objection to this scheme. The objection runs that we don't need any such mastery, and that, in order to know what is being pointed out by an act of ostension, all we need to do is appeal to acts of 'attention' or 'concentration':
§33: "You’ll say that you ‘meant’ something different each time you pointed. And if I ask how that is done, you’ll say you concentrated your attention on the colour, the shape, and so on".
Wittgenstein's retort to this is that attention itself is a differential, or rather, equivocal concept, and that 'attending' to something (a color, say), can itself mean very many different things (Witty provides a few different, equivocal examples of 'attention'). If this is so, then this means that the appeal to 'attention' just displaces the question back a step, rather than answering it: if 'attention' is what individuates an ostensive act, then what individuates attention?
Witty then qualifies his reply with an acknowledgement that while such acts of attention may (and often do) accompany the understanding of ostensive explanations, they nonetheless do not, or cannot, play a role in explaining how it is that ostension 'picks out' one aspect of what is being pointed to over others. At this point he makes draws a really interesting analogy: that while playing chess always involves moving pieces 'from here to there', actually playing chess involves more than (just) this. Witty doesn't expand on this, but it's clear this this 'more' would involve something like an understanding of how and why such moves are made: the analogous counterpart to which would be an understanding of how and why an ostensive explanation picks out this aspect of something, and not another (color, and not shape, say).
§34 - §36 will expand on this line of thought, with respect to 'characteristic experiences' in place of 'attention'.
One way to appreciate what's going on at a more global scale is that Wittgenstein is dealing with a twist on the classic question of sufficient reason - but instead of asking 'why is there something rather than nothing', at stake here is a more modest: 'why and how does ostensive explanation pick out this rather than that?' The search for a principle of sufficient ostensive explanation, if you will.
After #7 he distinguishes different language-games. For instance, at #8 he describes "an expansion of language (2)". But he later distinguishes the language-game at (2) from the language-game at (8). And may refer to language(2) and language (8). So for example, at 16 it's "language-game (8)", but at 17, it's "language (8)", and at 18 its "languages (2) and (8)". So (2) and (8) begin as distinguishable parts of learning "a language". They become distinct language-games. Then the distinct language games are themselves referred to as distinct languages.
So I believe #23 to be quite important because we have an approach presented here, toward the division of human activity. He asks "how many kinds of sentences are there?" And each different kind of sentence (a seemingly endless number), is itself a different language-game, which through the prior example from Frege, and Witty's usage described above, could be considered as a distinct language. But each distinct language-game is really "a part" of the overall activity commonly called "language", And further, even "the speaking of language is part of an activity" or of a form of life, such that the overall activity called "language" is a part of an even bigger activity, a "form of life".
The principle by which the activity, language, is divided here, is according to the kinds of sentences. And you will see that each different kind of sentence serves a different purpose. So the principle presented here, by which human activity is divided, is the purpose of the activity. Activities are segregated according to their purpose.
But the soundness of this division process is questionable because it is theoretical, and most likely could not be carried out in practise. What I mean is that all the different kinds of sentences exist as an integrated part of language which is integrated into the form of life, such that the smaller parts really depend, for existence, on the larger "whole", as having been developed within the context of the whole. So they cannot really be separated out as a distinct language-games, or distinct languages within the larger whole "language". Nor can language be separated from the whole "form of life". The way that they are integrated denies that this is a real possibility, But it is, nevertheless, a very useful theory and thought process, to demonstrate this relationship.
My only comment here would be that I would not talk of 'sentences'. Witty does not - at least in the context of defining language-games - and there's a very good reason for this, which will come up a little later down the track. While it's totally correct to say that language-games are embedded in 'forms-of-life', these language-games do not correspond to sentences, and it is certainly not the case that sentences 'are' language-games, as you put here (which in any case would be inconsistent with Witty's preliminary definition of a language-game which consists of "language and the activities into which it is woven" (my emphasis). Anyway, the point is: if you're thinking about language-games, forget 'sentences'.
Again, I don't like nitpicking, (but it is sometimes necessary to get through to the true meaning). At 23, Witty clearly asks "But how many kinds of sentence are there?" ,And this is a carry through from his discussion of Frege's idea of "an assertion", which Witty characterizes as a kind of sentence.
So at 23 Witty proposes "countless" different "kinds of sentence", and each kind is described as a distinct language-game, such that new kinds come into existence and others become obsolete. "(We can get a rough picture of this from the changes in mathematics.)". And this evolution (my term), appears to be what is referred to when a language-game is said to be a "form of life". Forms of life come into existence, and become obsolete through an evolutionary process.
In any case, these nitpicky items are where inconsistencies in an author's work appear to lie. If we assume that there was no such inconsistency within the author's mind, therefore within what the author meant, then the appearance of inconsistency needs to be resolved to truly understand what the author meant.
No, read carefully. Witty does not describe sentences as language-games. Here is the start of §23:
§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". (my bolding)
Witty does indeed begin by saying that there indeed countless kinds of sentence. But importantly, he then goes on to say that there are "countless different kinds of use of all the things we call 'signs', 'words', 'sentences'". What is 'countless' in the second part of the sentence are neither 'signs', 'words', or 'sentences', but the kinds of use of them. In other words, the bolded 'this diversity' refers to the kinds of use, and not individual 'signs', 'words', and 'sentences'. And it is the kinds of use that correspond to 'new types of language' and 'new language-games'.
And this makes far, far more sense that equating language-games with sentences. Not only because Witty is explicit that language-games consist of "language and the activities into which it is woven" (of which a 'sentence' cannot be), but also because it is consistent with Witty's previous description of a language-game as "the whole process of using words" (§7), where again, use is foregrounded, and not as it were, units of meaning. Finally, the fact that the primacy of the 'sentence' gives way to being simply one element in a set (list) of consisting of 'signs', 'words', and 'sentences' means that even if Witty did mean to say language 'were' sentences, they would also have to be 'signs', and 'words'. Which itself would be an incredibly strange thing to say.
In any case, any careful reading of §23 will dispel the mistaken idea that language-games could be identified with sentences - and this is to say nothing of the upcoming discussion about 'simples' and 'complexes' which would further put a definitive nail in the coffin of that reading.
I agree, a "kind of sentence" is a representation of a kind of usage. A language-game is an activity, and he is talking about different kinds of activities here. So "sentence" signifies a static physical thing, like a symbol or a word, but what is being talked about is the activity, the language-game. There are different kinds of activities within a language and one way of representing this is with the different kinds of sentences listed at 23.
Quoting StreetlightX
Again, I completely agree. A game is an activity (we've dispensed the qualification of 'according to rules' which I had added), and so a language-game is an activity. That's how game is being defined. It would be a completely incorrect interpretation to give primacy to the static sentence, over the activity which the sentence is more like a tool of. Witty's example at 23, that there are different kinds of sentences, serves to demonstrate that within this genus of activity called language, which he says is a game, there are various species, a multiplicity of language-games exemplified by a multiplicity of types of sentence. So reference to "sentence" here is meant only to exemplify different kinds of language use each as a distinct language-game. Therefore #24 starts with: "24. If you do not keep the multiplicity of language-games in view you will perhaps be inclined to ask questions like: "What is a question?..."
31
What he's describing here, and in surrounding sections, is someone who already knows language to some extent who is asking for ostensive demonstrations of things they don't know or aren't sure of. That's certainly a possibility--that's often what's the case when we're dealing with someone who asks for or could use an ostensive definition of something. Say when we're dealing with other adults, school-aged children, etc.--as obviously they're already going to know some language as they enter school. This is what we usually are dealing with.
However, this is by no means an argument to the effect that it's not logically possible to learn a language solely by ostension.
My only other comment on this section is that I'm a bit baffled by this:"One can also imagine someone's having learnt the game without ever learning or formulating rules." If we're talking about chess a la anything like what conventionally counts as knowing chess, I don't think Wittgenstein's claim there makes any sense.
32
If Wittgenstein is only talking about the passage he quoted I don't think this comment is warranted, but I don't suppose Wittgenstein only has in mind the brief passage he quotes at the start of the book.
At any rate, on my view children definitely think prior to learning language. They just think non-linguistically prior to learning language.
33
The first part of that, re "It is not true that you must already be master of a language in order to understand an ostensive definition: all you need—of course!—is to know or guess what the person giving the explanation is pointing to. That is, whether for example to the shape of the object, or to its colour, or to its number, and so on." is what I say. Re his comment immediately following this, it's as if Wittgenstein just quoted (via the hypothetical) "know or guess" but then immediately ignored that he included the "or guess" part.
The way that guesses are refined is via subsequent ostensive demonstrations. The student refines their abstraction in response to that.
"Suppose someone points to a vase and says 'Look at that marvellous blue—the shape isn't the point.'—Or: 'Look at the marvellous shape—the colour doesn't matter.'" You're not going to say anything like that to a baby or toddler to whom you're doing your first ostensive demonstrations of language. That's way too complicated for what they can understand. You're not going to speak a bunch a words in a row to them like that, unless you're a horrible teacher. It seems like Wittgenstein is very drifty in these comments re just what sort of student he has in mind for this argument.
[i]"But it isn't these things themselves that make us say someone is attending to the shape, the
colour, and so on."[/i] It depends on who we're talking about. Some people definitely would say someone is "attending to the shape" etc. due to those things themselves.
At any rate, this last section of 33 seems like it's going to matter more for following sections....
34
Yeah, no demonstration is going to be deterministic with respect to the way the student parses it. That's just how language works in general. It's a truism about language.
35
"For example, following the outline with one's finger or with one's eyes as one points" -- That still can't make anything epistemically deterministic re how the student is going to parse anything in their head. It's not possible to make that epistemically deterministic.
The end part of this section seems rambly to me. If we're talking about someone who already knows language a fair amount, sure we can clarify what we're pointing to in many different ways. What of it?
36
Not sure what in the world he's talking about in this section. It reads like something incoherent, but it's so brief and sketchy. Maybe he'll explain it better in a bit.
37
"What is the relation between name and thing named?"
There are a bunch of relations, both subjective and objective. The ones he gives as examples are fine.
38
"This" and "that" are conventionally basically verbal forms of pointing or gesturing towards something.
"Yet, strange to say, the word 'this' has been called the only genuine name; so that anything else we call a name was one only in an inexact, approximate sense."--no memory of who would have said that, but it's indeed a ridiculous thing to say.
[i]"Can I say 'bububu' and mean 'If it doesn't rain I shall go for a
walk'?[/i] --Of course you can do that. You can use any word, phrase, etc. to mean whatever you like.
"t is only in a language that I can mean something by something." ---only in the sense that saying "bububu" and meaning "If it doesn't rain I shall go for a walk" thus is sufficient to count as language. In other words, we'd just tautologically be saying that meaning something by something, where that involves words, counts as a language.
"To mean" is like "to imagine" in that it's picking out something that individuals are doing mentally.
The pdf version of the book has a lot of glitches by the way. There's something else missing in this section (and there were a couple things missing or a bit garbled in the preceding sections that I didn't comment on), anyway, continuing ....
You can give ostensive explanations of "that" and "this," sure. Since they're more abstract, that would just take more work.
Ummm . . . not sure what the heck he's saying in the "queer connection" part, either.
39
The idea that the meaning of a term is its extension is simply a dumb theory that leads to a lot of errors (as he demonstrates out in this section).
The last two sentences of this section do not make much sense to me:"So the word 'Excalibur' must disappear when the sense is analysed and its place be taken by words which name simples. It will be reasonable to call these words the real names."
40
Just reiterating that saying that the meaning of a term is its extension is a dumb theory that leads to mistakes. I agree with that. (If that's indeed where he's going to continue to go with this.)
....okay, I'll leave it at that until other folks are moving on more.
We just finished going over this, starting here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/232532
What it picks out, for the learner, is whatever the learner takes it to pick out. Again, that can be refined via numerous examples, which help the learner refine an abstraction to fit all of the examples (if the learner can manage to do so, assuming the teacher is doing something coherent, etc.)
Yeah, I agree with your objections about that. Sam's "cup" example didn't cut it, because using "cup" in sentences that people don't have a problem with is nothing like knowing how to play chess, where we mean anything like the conventional sense of what it is to know how to play chess. There's just no way to have learned how to play chess without knowing the rules of playing chess, since each piece has such specific ways it can move, with all of those being different, not being intuitive, etc.
For example, if you don't know that a pawn can only move straight forward except when capturing an opponent piece, and only one space at a time forward except on the first move, then it wouldn't make sense to say, with any of the conventional connotations, that "you've learned chess," But if you know that sort of stuff, you've learned the rules.
To make sense of saying, "You can have learned how to play chess without having learned the rules," someone would need to give an example of how someone would play chess, where they wouldn't know the rules, but where we'd agree, "Yep, they've learned chess." They'd need to give some examples of how that person would proceed. Which chess pieces would they move on some of their turns and how would they move them?
What about something like the way that AI learns, just by observing? I don't think it will do anything outside of what has been observed, but it amasses, and processes such a huge volume of possibilities just from observing. Isn't that how those Go playing computers work? You can't say that it has learned the rules, yet it won't do anything outside the rules because it hasn't learned anything outside the rules, as a possible move.
Quoting Terrapin Station
By observing, you would know that these are the only possible moves that a pawn could make, without having learned the rules. It's like inductive reasoning, by observing the same thing over and over again, you come to conclude that this is the only possibility, without first learning the rule.
But "these are the only possible moves the pawn can make" and so on are the rules.
No doubt an AI could learn most of the rules by observation (not all of them. There are some rules that are almost never used, such as changing a pawn into a bishop when it reaches the other end), but it would just waste processing time to make it do so rather than focusing on strategy and tactics.
It's a matter of knowing possible moves, rather than a matter of knowing rules. The two are distinct. For instance, I know that these possible actions, walk, bike, drive, take the bus, or take the train, will get me to work. When I want to go to work I simply chose one of these actions, depending on the circumstances. I do not know any rule which states that if I want to get to work I must chose one of these actions, or any such thing. So when I choose a means of getting to work, I am simply choosing a means of getting to work, from the possibilities that I know. I am not following any rule.
Hey Sam26, I agree with you (fancy that), SLX is doing a fine job.
Quoting Sam26
Would it be too simple to observe that we check our grammar by trying out phrases and knowing they are wrong or right without checking on the basis of another authority?
§34
In §34, Witty continues to pose an objection to himself, one that goes one step further than the failed self-critique of §33. Recall that in §33, the appeal to 'attention' was criticised for being too equivocal a notion to answer the question of how ostensive explanations are individuated ('attention' can work in many different ways, and so cannot function to explain how ostensive explanation works to pick out one kind of thing and not another kind of thing). §34 tries to address this counter-objection by turning instead to 'characteristic experiences', which, unlike 'attention', are always the 'same' - that is, univocal, rather than equivocal.
This is meant to correct the 'defect' of the (self-critical) argument in §33, by having the same experience always undergird the individuation of ostensive explanation (rather than the different - and hence inadequate - modes of attention offered in §33). However, Witty notes that this too is not good enough, because even if the 'same experience' always accompanies an ostensive explanation, there is no guarantee that such an experience will itself always be interpreted in the same way:
§34: "Can’t his hearer still interpret the explanation differently, even though he sees the other’s eyes following the contour, and even though he feels what the other feels?".
Univocity of experience gives way once again to equivocity (diversity) of interpretation. In place of experience then, Wittgenstein once again emphasizes the use of words in an ostensive explanation - a use which cannot be reduced to the experiences which merely accompany 'the giving and hearing of an explanation'.
Anyway, I don't want to derail the conversation but I do want to push back a tad on the notion that Sellars inherits or continues Wittgenstein's legacy in any significant way. *push*
The analogy doesn't work because there aren't any "rules of getting to work" akin to the rules of chess, especially with respect to what people have in mind when they say that someone has learned chess.
I will definitely agree with this.
Wittgenstein damming the notion of a private language.
That's exactly the point, I can learn the possible moves without learning rules. It wasn't an analogy, I was just demonstrating that learning the possible moves is not the same thing as learning rules. You had suggested that it was. Now you seem to be in agreement that it is not the same thing.
Quoting Banno
What Wittgenstein is discussing here, is the fact that learning a language when one already knows a language is quite different from learning a first language. And, he interprets Augustine's description of learning a first language as similar to how one would learn a secondary language. So he says that Augustine's description of ostensive learning requires that the child already knows how to think in the sense of "talk to itself", i.e. think using words. Clearly this description of ostension is incorrect, because the child hasn't yet learned how to use words, so it cannot think using words, to figure out the meaning of the words being ostensively demonstrated.
The problem is that if you know the possible moves in a manner to prompt "He's learned chess," then you know the rules . Are you simply saying that you don't realize that you know the rules per se, even though you do?
I am saying that he would not know the rules, even though he learned how to play chess. He'd know possible moves, and knowing possible moves, and being able to choose from them, would allow him to play the game. And, as I demonstrated, knowing possible moves is not the same thing as knowing rules. Possible moves are particulars, rules are general. Knowing the particular possibilities is not the same thing as knowing the general "rule", because the latter requires an act of inductive reasoning. So you are creating a false representation, claiming a falsity, when you insist that knowing the particular possibilities is the same thing as knowing the rules.
What would the difference be there when we're talking about chess? How do chess rules require inductive reasoning where knowing the possible moves does not?
Consider that Wittgenstein has been arguing that one must already know some sort of language-games prior to being able to learn words ostensively. These language-games might just be private, so this is clearly not yet damning the notion of private language.
I told you, rules are generalities, individual possibilities are particulars. So for instance the rule states that the bishop may only move diagonally. That's something general. The person who knows the possible moves, but doesn't know the rules, will look at the position of the bishop and know every possible square that the bishop can move to, without knowing that rule. This person might not even know what "diagonally" means. You of course will ask how could the person know these possibilities without knowing the rule, but we went trough this already, it is proposed that the person may learn this from observation.
So first, are we imagining people saying, "Joe has learned chess," as a response simply to watching Joe play chess?
Re this:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Actually, I'm trying to figure out how "Joe memorized every square the bishop can move to" (ignoring the ridiculous of them doing that without mentally forming an abstraction of it) is different, functionally, than "Joe has learned that the bishop can move only diagonally."
Functionally? Of course it's the same functionally. Joe can play the game. We're not discussing whether it's different functionally, we agree that it's the same functionally. It's two distinct ways of knowing, which may serve the same function.
So you're just saying that it's different in how Joe is thinking about it?
He only suggests that one can imagine it, but even if you can't imagine it, it's a minor detail. The point of this section is in relation to use of the phrase "This is the king". This phrase might be used when explaining to someone who otherwise knows all the rules, or who otherwise knows how to play chess (e.g. only via mimicking the behaviours of others), which piece or shape represents the king. "This is the king" might also be used in the case of teaching someone how to play chess, but Wittgenstein stresses that this is possible only:
This section (31) relates back to his previous remarks on ostensive definition, and also leads into his brilliant summary at section 32 of the problem he has identified in Augustine's description of learning "human language": Augustine describes it "as if the child...already had a language only not this one". Wittgenstein spells out his position in section 33: "you must already be master of a language in order to understand an ostensive definition".
This leads him into a defence of this claim and an attack on the anticipated argument/assumption that ostension (i.e. pointing or "attending to") is only mental, intentional, or even spiritual.
I agree that it may be difficult to imagine someone knowing how to play chess without having learnt the rules of chess, but consider that children learn how to speak before they learn any rules of language, by mimicking the behaviours of others. Also, bear in mind that Wittgenstein is attacking certain prevalent philosophical assumptions of his time, including those of his Tractatus, that language is exclusively a private, mental phenomenon. He is trying to remind us that language is instead (or also?) a shared, public, cultural and behavioural phenomenon.
Yes, how Joe is thinking about it is different, because how Joe learnt it is different. He didn't learn how to play the game by learning the rules of the game, he learnt how to play the game by observing the play of the game.
The tale will grow in the telling. The thrust is that there are ways to understand rules apart from listing them.
A child can play "duck, duck goose" well before they could articulate the rules.
Again, it is worth noting the distinction between explicating the rules of a game and participating in the game. That's the wedge being driven in here.
§35
§35 continues the critique of 'characteristic experiences' as the grounding for ostensive explanations begun in §34. If, in §34, characteristic experiences were critiqued for being open to different interpretations, in §35 Witty now also adds that ostensive explanations also cannot be separated from the use of words that accompany them. That is, ostensive explanations are not just a matter of mute, physical pointing, but the coupling of such physical actions with the utterance of words (like, 'that's the color' or 'it's that shape').
To the extent that this is so, Witty argues that the presence of words makes all the difference, because words themselves - the same words - can mean very many different things, because the same words can be used differently, which in turn, determines how it is an ostensive explanation is meant to be 'taken'. The 'same' (physical) pointing action, accompanied by different uses of words, will be understood differently - will have a different meanings.
At stake here is the question of intensionality (not intentionality, which means something entirely different): the understanding of something as something: the pointing as meaning X, rather than Y. The discussion here is meant, among other things, to show that intensionality cannot be dictated or determined by 'experiences', but instead, only by the use of language, which is inseparable and essential in the functioning of an ostensive explanation. This is the point of the rhetorical question which ends the subsection -
§35: "But do you also know of an experience characteristic of pointing at a piece in a game as a piece in a game?" (emphasis in original)
- which, if I'm right, is meant precisely to be a nonsense question (the 'right' response to this question ought to be something like: 'what is that question even supposed to be asking'?). The issue of intensionality must be kept in mind to make sense of the boxed note right after §35, which is rather enigmatic, but deals precisely with the difference between the two statements:;
(1) That is blue; [that particular thing is blue colored] and
(2) That is blue. [that is an example of the color blue]
Once again, it's a question of the differential nature of ostensive explanations, and of how and why they are differential: because of the different ways words are/can be used when giving such explanations. Importantly, this is specific to the issue of meaning:
§35 (boxed note): "It is only in a language that I can mean something by something. This shows clearly that the grammar of “to mean” does not resemble that of the expression “to imagine” and the like."
I image that Wittgenstein thought the reader would be educated enough to understand this and not to read beyond the context of the term “ostensive” and go awry.
Do we really need to linger on what he means by “ostensive” when we can simply assume he meant “ostensive” not some slighlty obscured use of the term?
§36 is a bit confusing on first blush, but it's simply recapitulating what I've called the differential nature of ostension: one bodily action can correspond to many different kinds of things:
§36: "We cannot specify any one bodily action which we call pointing at the shape (as opposed to the colour, for example)"
The only addition here is that Witty gives 'names' to the two parts of the ostensive act: the movement of the hand is 'bodily'; that which the movement corresponds to is 'mental' or 'spiritual'. This characterization seems a bit strange, but it allows Witty to start to introduce - in a very oblique way - a vitally important theme that will preoccupy much of the PI: the fact that we can be misled by language.
There is a possibility that an ostensive act may simply correspond to no particular kind of thing at all (a rough and inexact example: pointing out 'that color', while pointing to clear water; In this case, the pointing 'suggests' something that isn't there - the water has no color). When Witty says:
§36: "Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit." (emphasis in original).
The reference to 'spirit' here must be understood pejoratively, like an illusion, or, in the words of the boxed note in §35, as a 'superstition'. There are uses of language which engender spirits and superstition.
I wouldn't say that that distinction is picked out by "not having learned rules," though, especially not in contradistinction to "learning the game," where we're talking about a game like chess.
Teachers can know a lot of stuff that they can't explain very well. Knowing something doesn't imply that you write or speak in a clear, comprehensible way about it. --Heck, one might even know this distinction and call it "learning" rather than "articulating." :razz:
Yeah, I agree the chess thing is a minor part that's not really worth the time we're spending on it (though it's amusing to me watching people trying to bend over backwards to defend such a minor bit of what I consider bad writing/bad philosophizing).
Re the other comments, obviously I disagree with Wittgenstein's views re whether language--at least the semantics part--is "public," whether it's possible to learn language by ostension, etc.
Wittgenstein can use words in a peculiar way, as we've now seen with "game". So it is important not to take any such thing for granted, and bring out what he really means by the word. Remember what he said at #3, you can make your description correct by restricting your definition, but then if we ask, whether your description is appropriate, "The answer is: 'Yes, it is appropriate, but only for this narrowly circumscribed region, not for the whole of what you were claiming to describe.'"
I'm trying to diligently compare StreetlightX's interpretation of the text with my own, so here's how I interpret 33 - 36.
At 33 he describes how the distinction between shape, colour, etc., must be made in ostensive definition, by the speaker concentrating one's attention on which aspect is being referred to. If you're the one giving the demonstration, you must concentrate your attention on the aspect of the thing which is being named. The question is how this concentration of attention is communicated to the learner. So he discusses possible differences between attending to the colour and attending to the shape.
At 34 he points to the difference between what is intended by the giver, and what is interpreted by the hearer. There is an important point here, very relevant to "meaning", and that is that we have no description which "stands for a process which accompanies the giving and hearing of the definition." This is to say that as activities, the intention associated with giving, is distinct from the interpretation of receiving, and we have no description which conflates these two distinct activities into one process. There is no single process which encompasses both. The giving and the hearing are distinct activities and this is why there is never certainty on the part of the hearer, as to what the speaker's attention is directed toward.
At 35, it is described how there is no "characteristic experience" which can give the hearer what is intended by the speaker. No particular activity by the speaker can tell the hearer what the speaker attends to. There is nothing particular, no particular type of activity, "to mean the shape", "to mean the colour", and so on.
So at 36, that, the physical activity (the "body") which represents what is intended by the speaker (what the speaker means), is said to be non-existent, and so we say it's something "spiritual". There is no bodily activity which can appropriately represent what is intended by the speaker, so we say that this, what is intended, or meant, is something spiritual, mental, or intellectual.
I would dismiss StreetlightX's discussion of intension as a diversion, and not relevant to the text.
That is all.
He doesn’t mention, up to now, the meaning of “ostensive” teaching by showing what something is by using it - such as balancing on a contraption of two circular objects connected via a triangular frame with a chain wrapped around two smaller circular objects that are attached to the frame and to one of the larger circular objects. Merely pointing at the object and saying “bike” means nothing if you have no idea what the hell it is for and why you should hive a damn.
A couple of anecdotes that may or may not illuminate.
I used to keep a cow. One day I was in the field picking rose-hips, and Ermintrude wandered over to see what I was doing. As she was interested, I offered her a sample. A large cow can eat a lot faster than I can pick, so she wasn't getting any more, but she liked them, and shortly thereafter, I saw her trying to pick her own. Unfortunately, a cow's tongue is not very good for picking the hips while avoiding the prickles. Poor Emmy!
So here is ostensive teaching and learning, but no language. We understand each other, but not linguistically.
My son is about ten months old, and not going to sleep, so I take him to the back -door. It's a mild Autumn night, so I step outside and point out the full moon, "Look, there's the moon." I say. This is not the first one-sided conversation we have had.
" Moon!" Pointing franticly "Moon! Moon!"
"Yes, that's the moon," I reply.
"Moon! Moon! Moon!"
It's his first word, and our first proper conversation, and what he has discovered is something far more exciting than the meaning of one word, it is that there are words, and they mean stuff. How very different from my conversations with Ermintrude:
"Moo! Moo! Moo!"
" Yeah, I know, Emmy, the prickles stop you picking the hips. Tough luck!"
"Moo!"
I generally agree with Luke, but want to add something about rules which will be coming up in the PI. As you know grammar for Wittgenstein is much more than what we usually mean by grammar, i.e., it's much more than what we might learn in an English class covering nouns, adjectives, and verbs for example. His use of grammar extends to the logic of use, which governs linguistic practices as a whole, including how we use words in social settings, and the physical actions associated with the use of the words.
So, if you're learning to play a game by watching others, then by definition you're actions conform to certain rules. If a child learns how to speak using words, then the child actions comport or conform to the rules. Moreover, the child is learning how to follow a rule without knowing he/she is following a rule. If the child has learned to use a word correctly, then using the word correctly is, again, following the rules.
One can probably only go so far without learning some of the explicit rules of language, or without learning some of the written rules of chess. In other words, some games, including language-games, and even mathematics can be learned up to a point by watching, but at some point you will have to learn the rules.
Note carefully what Wittgenstein said in PI 31, "[o]ne can imagine someone's having learnt the game without ever learning or formulating rules," he's not saying you can learn a language without participating in rule-following. He's not saying you can learn a game without following rules, but without having learned or formulated rules, that's much different from saying, you can learn a game without the actions you're learning conforming to the rules. Just as a child needn't learn or formulate rules to learn how to use the word cup, and yet the child's actions do conform to rules. There is a subtle difference here.
However, rule-following at this stage of the PI is closely associated with what he's talking about in terms of ostensive definitions, and it's closely related, as Luke rightly pointed out, with his former view of language.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/3317/on-rule-following/p1
What a lovely name for a cow. She must have been a smart cow. Moo!
Hello, Dagny, we're reading the Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein in this thread. You're welcome to start a reading group on The Republic if you want to. I'm currently too booked with other reading groups to be able to help out with such an awesome book as Plato's Republic. Best regards.
Read carefully 34-36. Notice at 35 he describes how there is no bodily action which has a necessary relation with "I mean the shape", or the colour. No necessary relation means that there cannot be a rule. This is why he claims a separation between what the speaker intends and what the hearer interprets at 34, because there is no necessary relation (like cause and effect) between the two activities, allowing them to be associated. There is nothing to signify to the hearer in any necessary way, what is intended by the speaker. There is no rule which the hearer can refer to, such as "this bodily action means colour", or "that bodily action means shape". Even if there are characteristic actions which occur often, they do not always occur, [so this excludes the possibility of a rule]. He even repeats this at 35:
Wittgenstein is describing this type of learning as one which does not involve rules.
Part of the point of Wittgenstein talking about the ostensive definition model or deriving meaning from this medium is that there are no rules in this medium unless it's connected up with other people and actions. If I point to an object and say pencil, how would you know what I'm referring too? Do I mean it's color, its length, that it has an eraser, etc? There is no way for the word pencil to connect up with the object, no social rule. This example is not even a language-game, it doesn't have the requisite social settings. However, if you compare this with the language-game at the beginning of the PI there is a big difference. So, in Wittgenstein's example, he says pillar, or points to the object and says pillar, and there must be the corresponding action that tells the builder that the assistant understands what's required, i.e., that the assistant understands the rules of the game. He must bring the correct object. If the assistant doesn't do the required action, then the builder will correct him by showing him the correct action, until finally the assistant understands the rule.
Often when we teach children this method (ostensive pointing and learning) there is a period of time where they don't understand. When they finally do get it, it's not because they've grasped some mental process on our part, but because they learn what is required through trial and error (correct and incorrect) - they have grasped the logic behind the use of the word (the grammar). Their actions have matched the rule-governed activity of the social group. Just pointing at something and uttering a sound isn't enough in itself, it must be coupled with other things within a social context.
We've jumped a bit ahead, because in this early part of the book he's trying to show us something about the ostensive model, and how it sometimes lacks what is needed for someone to learn what is meant by a word or concept. He's pointing out the deficiencies of this view of language. He's pointing out the deficiencies of his previous view. He's also doing much more, but to explain I would have to write a lot more.
I don't think this will help you MU, i.e., I'm pessimistic, but it will help others, hopefully.
And that is precisely not what W is talking about. He is referring to “language,” as in like this here thing we’re using now. People with no language can, and do, function in the world.
When W says “ostensive” he is talking about articulting to someone what something “is called”/“named” not simply flapping around and making noises that are to be taken to be associated with the action - much like me pointing at a bike does nothing to tell you it’s purpose; but I can explain further (by speaking) and then show you.
All communicative forms have limitations. I don’t find this surprising because that is the very reason they can function as a means of communication.
One thing I will mention - because I think there's been some confusion around this with respect to some of the discussion here - is that in the sections covered in the PI so far, Witty has been dealing not with 'ostension in general' (mere acts of pointing), but what he calls 'ostensive explanation' or 'ostensive definition', which involves, specifically, explaining words by means of ostension. That is: ostensive act (pointing) + utterance of words. If this coupling is not kept in mind, the discussion here will be unintelligible.
Thanks for the acknowledgement, Sam, which has encouraged me to write some more and provide my own reading of §33 and §34 below. I hope some might find it useful.
§33 Wittgenstein asserts that "you must already be a master of a language to understand an ostensive definition". However, he anticipates the objection that in order to understand an ostensive definition you only need to know or guess what the person giving the explanation is pointing to, e.g., to its shape, colour or number. Wittgenstein invites us to point to a piece of paper, and now to point to it's shape, it's colour, its number, etc. Presumably the physical act of pointing remained the same throughout, so what changed when you "pointed" at these different features of the piece of paper? Wittgenstein anticipates the response that "you 'meant' a different thing each time you pointed", by concentrating your attention on one feature instead of another. But how is the person to whom the explanation is being given supposed to differentiate when you are pointing at one feature instead of another, if the only change in the "pointing" is your (private, mental) concentration of attention.
Wittgenstein then considers whether you always do the same thing, or always have the same accompanying behaviours, when you direct your attention to (e.g.) the colour of an object. After inviting the reader to consider different cases of attending to the colour, he notes that there can be many different behaviours associated with attending to the colour, and that these behaviours occur in conjunction with attending to the colour, but that it is not the behaviours alone which "make us say someone is attending to the shape, the colour, and so on".
Wittgenstein offers the following analogy: "Just as a move in chess doesn't consist simply in moving a piece in such-and-such a way on the board — nor yet in one's thoughts and feelings as one makes the move: but in the circumstances that we call "playing a game of chess", "solving a chess problem", and so on."
On my reading, Wittgenstein indicates that understanding an (ostensive) definition is not something which happens only in the mind of the listener or student, and neither is it something which is only tied to a specific set of accompanying behaviours; rather, it depends on the wider circumstances surrounding the language game.
§34. Wittgenstein asks us to imagine someone who always has the same feelings and behaviours whenever they attend to the shape [of an object]. He further asks us to imagine that this person is giving someone else the ostensive definition of a circle by pointing to a circle and saying "That is a circle". Wittgenstein says that "his hearer" could still interpret this definition differently even if he "sees the other's eyes following the outline, and even though he feels what the other feels". Wittgenstein continues: "That is to say: this 'interpretation' may also consist in how he now makes use of the word; in what he points to, for example, when told: "Point to a circle".
Wittgenstein is again trying to loosen the reader's grip on the view that understanding a definition has anything to do with one's feelings and/or accompanying behaviours while attending to an object, or while giving/hearing the definition. Instead, he indicates that understanding the definition is more about how the hearer "now makes use of the word" and in what he points to when asked to point to a circle.
Even if the hearer and the speaker share identical feelings and behaviours while attending to the object or while giving/hearing the definition, the hearer could still 'interpret' the definition differently. (Also note Wittgenstein's use of scare quotes on 'interpretation' here, indicating that there may actually be no interpretation involved.)
Wittgenstein concludes that: "neither the expression "to intend the definition in such and-such a way" nor the expression "to interpret the definition in such-and-such a way" stands for a process which accompanies the giving and hearing of the definition." Again, understanding a definition is usually judged by how the hearer goes on to use the word and react to the word's use. It usually has little to do with a speaker's intention or a hearer's interpretation.
The main point I was wanting to make is that when one points to something and makes a sound, one cannot point to the sound. One does not need to understand the composition and function of the moon to learn the name, but one needs to understand that human sounds have meaning, and that cannot be told in meaningful sounds or by pointing. Small children have that moment of revelation, and cows never do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Roundabout
I'll definitely agree with this, if you uncouple these two things you'll definitely be lost.
Quoting Luke
This is also an extremely important point to keep in mind when thinking about what Wittgenstein is trying to say in the long run. The meaning of a word/concept can never be the result of one's private mental happenings. There is nothing within you that gives meaning to a word. I was reading a book on epistemology by a philosopher who was trying to give meaning to the word knowledge by associating the word with something going on privately, as though you could give meaning to the word by some internal mechanism apart from social context. It's difficult to catch their mistake when it's coupled with language that's correctly used.
Quoting Luke
I agree with the first part of this, but the last half raises questions. What could understanding what it means to play chess, be, other than specific behaviors associated within the social context of the game? Are you talking about private behavior? I agree that it depends on the wider social context, but aren't these wider social contexts or surroundings "accompanying behaviors?"
This is the complete opposite of my view.
Quoting Sam26
The "apart from social context" bit is irrelevant to whether meanings can be the result of one's private mental happenings.
Imagine if we were to say this: It's impossible to give meaning to a word by some internal mechanism apart from social context. It's only possible to give meaning to a word by some internal mechanism when immersed in a social context.
Well, in this case, one is still giving meaning to a word by some internal mechanism. That that internal mechanism might only be engaged when immersed in a social context doesn't imply that it's not an internal mechanism that gives meaning to words.
I don't actually agree with "It's only possible to give meaning to a word by some internal mechanism when immersed in a social context," but that's not important. Stressing the necessity of social context isn't actually an argument against meaning being produced privately.
It's similar to this: imagine if someone said, "Writing is only produced by ink being directly applied to a particular sheet of paper." (We're imagining that we don't also have writing via making scratch marks in dirt, via chiseling stone, etc.) Then imagine if someone else said, "As though you could apply ink to a particular sheet of paper outside of a social context." Maybe you couldn't--the social context is maybe necessary to make things like ink, ink-applicators, paper, etc. But that wouldn't change the fact that writing is only produced by ink being directly applied to a particular sheet of paper.
I was probably unclear. I was referring to the behaviours which accompany attending to the shape or attending to the colour during the giving/hearing of an ostensive definition. For example, the behaviour of following the perimeter of a shape with one's eyes. As Wittgenstein makes more clear in 34, it is what one subsequently goes on to do with the word in the definition, or how one (later) reacts to the word, which demonstrate one's understanding of the definition. In short, the experiences and behaviours one has during the giving/hearing of the definition do not forge a magical connection between word meaning and object feature.
Otherwise, what do you make of his statement that "a move in chess doesn't consist simply in moving a piece in such-and-such a way on the board"?
What do you think of Terrapin Station's reply to me?
So you deal with this activity which is not governed by rules, by restricting your definition of "language-game", such that ostensive learning is not a language-game. I would say that this interpretation is doubtful, as the quote from Luke indicates "you must already be a master of a language to understand an ostensive definition".
Quoting Sam26
The problem with the so-called "ostensive model" is that there really is no such model. Any such descriptions are incomplete, in important ways. That's what Witty indicates at 34, there is no description which relates to both the giving and receiving. Even his description of ostensive definition is quite lacking because he doesn't take into account the "period of time" which you refer to above.
The period of time allows for things like trial and error, and process of elimination. In this way a random "guess", can be transformed into "the right response", in the mind of the learner. Nor does Witty seem to address the learning of "yes" and "no" which are used by the giver to signify correct and incorrect to the learner. It is this aspect which would allow for rules in the social sense of "rules" as "connected up with other people and actions".
Quoting Luke
This is an interesting development. You have used the word "judged' here, and Witty makes no such mention. You seem to be anticipating what will follow in the text. However, do you think that understanding a definition requires being judged as understanding? Couldn't one understand the definition, and go away with that understanding, without ever being judged as having understood? This relates to my discussion with Sam26 above, and the "period of time" involved in ostensive learning as a process. That period of time may consist of "guessing", trial and error, elimination, or what have you, and the student is told when the "guess" is correct. So "being judged" is actually very important because this is the only way that the learner knows when the proper response has been made. It's as if the learner is being conditioned, by being rewarded when the response is consistent with what is wanted by the instructor.
I think it is important to understand this aspect of ostensive definition. What is being "pointed" to is the word, that is what is being defined. The "pointing" here is the teacher drawing the student's attention to the word. It's too easy to imagine the physical objects as what is being pointed to, because of the physical act of pointing. But the objects being "pointed" to, in the more physical sense of the word, are just props being used to demonstrate the usage of the word.
Quoting StreetlightX
I find it very interesting how different people interpret the same, short passages, in quite a variety of different ways, by focusing their attention on specific parts of the given passages. As much as possible, I would like to encourage everyone to offer their own interpretations of important passages. I think that this is what is meant by "reading it together".
Agreed. And not just interpretations, but comments, too--do you think the author is right or wrong? Why? What do you think is right instead? The whole point of learning philosophy should be to do philosophy. We're not museum curators or simply literature appreciators or something like that.
Discussion of whether the author is right or wrong would digress into endless bickering, because in philosophy this question usually cannot be resolved. My opinion is that such discussions should be brought to another thread so as not to hinder our progress.
I obviously don't agree with that at all, but I suppose you won't want to endlessly bicker about it. :razz:
Terrapin appears to want to have it both ways, appearing to say that meaning can be private even if it's also public. I'm not convinced.
Terrapin speaks of meaning as being "the result of one's private mental happenings". Clearly, there have been individuals who have coined words which are now common in our language, but more is required than just one person making up a word in order for it to gain acceptance and usage in a linguistic community. For example, there is also the linguistic community and whether they adopt the word's usage. Furthermore, there is nothing which compels a linguistic community to preserve the original meaning of a word and use it the same way as the coiner.
On Terrapin's last comment, 'writing' is also a common word of our language which is usually defined more narrowly than simply applying ink to paper. Otherwise, da Vinci's Vitruvian Man would also be considered as writing rather than a drawing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes. Also, I believe that Wittgenstein alludes to judging in section 35 that follows, when he says that it depends "on the circumstances — that is, on what happened before and after the pointing — whether we should say "He pointed to the shape and not to the colour"." [my bolding]
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Perhaps, but how does one know that one has actually understood unless one tests/demonstrates that understanding? For example, I believe that I have some understanding of the current text, but we'll see...
§35. Wittgenstein continues to discuss what he calls "characteristic experiences" or what I have called "accompanying experiences", which are had in conjunction with pointing or 'attending to' (e.g.) the shape. Wittgenstein offers the example of "following the outline with one's finger or with one's eyes as one points." However, he notes that characteristic experiences do not accompany pointing in every case, but even if they did, it would still depend on what happens before and after the pointing for "whether we should say "He pointed to the shape and not to the colour"."
Wittgenstein notes that characteristic experiences are characteristic "because they recur often (but not always) when shape or number are 'meant'." Wittgenstein notes that there is no characteristic experience which accompanies pointing to a piece in a game as a game piece. Nonetheless, one can still mean that this game piece is called the king, rather than (e.g.) this piece of wood is called the king.
Wittgenstein ends the section with "(Recognizing, wishing, remembering, etc. .)", possibly indicating that characteristic experiences are similarly associated with these activities but, again, not necessarily.
Quoting Luke
Just to remind you, at this point in the text there is nothing to indicate that meaning could be private, or "public" (whatever "public" might mean in this context). These terms do not seem to relate. We have the giver in ostensive definition, and the hearer (W appears hesitant to even use "interpret"). There is a gap between these two, and not a sufficient degree of consistency in the relationship between them, such that we could describe this relationship with "rules", though he does describe it with "games".
Quoting Luke
There clearly is judgement referred to, on the part of the hearer. The hearer must judge the act of the giver, "he pointed to the shape", or "he pointed to the colour", which transposes into "he meant the shape", or "he meant the colour". However, what I was referring to was the need to expose the reciprocal judgement from the giver, "you judged my pointing correctly", "you judged my pointing incorrectly". This reciprocal judgement is not brought out by Wittgenstein, at this point, though you referred to it "...understanding a definition is usually judged by how the hearer goes on to use the word...".
Quoting Luke
What I interpret as important with this discussion of "characteristic experiences", is the qualification of "not always". The "not always" implies that this understanding is created without rules, referring to the example at #31. This is how Witty is developing his conception of how we understand "types". The way that we understand types, without reference to definite rules, means that a type is a morphological thing not necessarily restricted by rules, like a form of life.
I don't at all believe that meaning is public. It's not at all possible to make meaning public in my view. Meaning isn't the same thing as a definition.
Re the writing thing, I wasn't proposing a definition.
I don't have much time, but I was asked for my opinion of Terrapin's Station's previous post, so I was not speaking to the text there
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Right, I broadly agree with this.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, I agree. I should maybe have put more emphasis on this. However, I see 35 and 36 as being a continuation of 33 and 34 and that I mostly covered what's there in my remarks on 33 and 34.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Okay.
I didn't think you would let him off the hook so easily Luke. Now I'm am forced, in my own inimitable way, to say that not only is Terrapin incorrect, but what he's saying is logically impossible, or at the very least linguistically impossible. Moreover, no argument you give will save you from this error. What error? This error, Terrapin says, "I don't believe that meaning is public. It's not at all possible to make meaning public..." This is akin to saying, "I don't believe triangles have three sides." It's the nature of rule-following to be public, just as it's the nature of triangles to have three sides. Period! And no response you can give will change that. If you can't see this, then your ability to think through this stuff is called into question. In other words, what I'm saying is that you can't be more confused than this when reading the PI. In fact, I wonder what you will get out of reading the PI if you don't understand this central point.
Now, you can come back and tell me how wrong I am, but any response you give will dig the hole much deeper.
As I mentioned above, we have no indication in the text so far, as to what "public" would mean in this context. We have people playing games, "language-games", givers and receivers in what you might call "the act" of ostensive definition. The problem being that this "act" is divided such that it is really two distinct acts, the act of the giver, and the act of the hearer. There is no premise whereby we might conclude that they are involved in one activity, thus playing one game. Therefore there is no basis for the assumption of anything "public".
§36. As there is no single characteristic behaviour or "bodily action" associated with pointing to a feature (e.g. to shape or to colour), "we say that a spiritual [mental, intellectal] activity corresponds to these words". He returns to comment on this 'queer connexion' or 'occult process' at §38.
§37. Wittgenstein asks us to try and identify "the relation between name and thing named". W says that "you can see the sort of thing this relation consists in" when we look at language games including his 'block-slab-pillar-beam' language-game at §2. W states that the relation "may also consist, among many other things" in the mental picture that is produced when we hear the name, or "in the name's being written on the thing named or being pronounced when that thing is pointed at".
§38. W notes that the words "this" and "that" are not names, and have a different function to names. W states that names are defined "by means of the demonstrative expression"; for example "That is N". However, he notes that the words "this" and "that" are not similarly defined [e.g. by saying "This is called 'this'".]
W states that this is connected with a view of naming which he likens to "an occult process", in which the relation between name and thing named is considered to be a "queer connexion". He states that according to this view "we may indeed fancy naming to be some remarkable act of mind, as it were a baptism of an object". However, he considers this view of naming to be erroneous, as evidenced by his famous phrase from this section that "philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday". W suggests that attempts to use the demonstrative pronouns "this" and "that" as names is the result of a specifically philosophical confusion and "doubtless only occurs in doing philosophy".
§39. W states that "one is tempted to make an objection against what is ordinarily called a name" and to insist that "a name ought really to signify a simple". This is reminiscent of the logical atomism of his Tractatus. W offers putative reasoning in support of this 'tempting' view, using the example of the sword "Excalibur". He states that the sentence "Excalibur has a sharp blade" makes sense whether or not the sword is whole or broken into parts, but that if the sword is broken into parts then the name "Excalibur" has no referent. Since the sentence about its sharp blade makes sense, then "there must always be something corresponding to the words of which it consists". W says that therefore "the word "Excalibur" must disappear when the sense is analysed and its place be taken by words which name simples".
Edit: I guess it's possible some here might come to see what is going on in the PI, although I'm not too hopeful.
Isn't one of the chief aims of the PI to get this point across to people like Terrapin? It seems a little weird - with respect to the aims of the PI - to get frustrated with Terrapin for not understanding this point before engaging seriously with the PI. (Not that his refusal to engage with the point isn't frustrating. But it's frustrating because he refuses to take the point seriously and attempt to undergo the work required to fully grasp its significance -- not because he can't get anything out of the book if he hasn't already accepted this view.)
I tend to agree with Conant/Diamond here insofar as I take it that this is what Witty understands therapy to consist in and why the notion is so central to his meta-philosophy. You can't shout Terrapin into understanding this point, as you seem to be doing in your post. Nor can you force him to engage in the sort of philosophical therapy he needs to understand it so long as he refuses to work with L.W. qua therapist in order to fully realize the point through a sort of anerkennen (i.e. if he reads Wittgenstein as his buddy rather than as a philosophical diagnostician who needs to be allowed some pathos of distance in order to show the reader what he wants him to see).
I appreciate your remarks upon remarks 36 to 39 as they look at how "corresponding" is assumed so often while not looking at how it is done.
in particular, Quoting Terrapin Station
Why would this be worthy of mention here?
A part of the book that can be overlooked is the way Wittgenstein is teaching a method for doing philosophy. §37 is a case in point. He does not go off theorising about names and the named, but rather draws our attention to a few examples. He want us to look to what is being done here.
"And here we may fancy naming to be some remarkable act of the mind..." So speak those who would avoid Kripke's critique of reference by baptism.
The discussion from §37 marks a new line in the progression of argument so far. Having, in §36, begun to broach the issue of being mislead by language (i.e. issues of ‘spirit’ and ‘superstition’), Witty will begin to flesh this out by comparing what we might call the logic of names with the logic of demonstratives (‘this’ and ‘that’). The issue once again hinges upon the different kinds of words that names and demonstratives are:
§38: "the word “name” serves to characterize many different, variously related, kinds of use of a word a but the kind of use that the word “this” has is not among them”.
This confusion between different kinds of words, when one kind is mistaken for another, is what happens, Witty famously says, when “language goes on holiday". Philosophical problems in particular, Witty avers, arise from just these kinds of confusions between kinds of (uses of) words. Here he speaks specifically on demonstratives mistaken for names:
§38: "For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. And then we may indeed imagine naming to be some remarkable mental act, as it were the baptism of an object. And we can also say the word “this” to the object, as it were address the object as “this” - a strange use of this word, which perhaps occurs only when philosophizing”.
§39-§45
§39 till about §44 fleshes this out further, by trying to distinguish all the more rigorously between names and demonstratives. This happens by way of a discussion of how names don’t actually need a referent - or ‘bearer’, as Witty calls it - to be of use, that is, to have sense (italicised by Witty in §39). This is fairly straightforward so I won’t go into it, but the pay-off is in §45, where Witty definitively distinguishes names and demonstratives by noting that unlike names, demonstratives “can never be without a bearer”. The point of all of this is, again, to distinguish between different kinds of uses of words, which has been the common thread running through the entire book so far.
§43
§43 is easily one of the most famous and widely cited passages in the PI, so worth backtracking a little and devoting a remark to it. First, the passage itself:
§43: “For a large class of cases of the employment of the word “meaning” - though not for all - this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer.”
One thing that jumps out at me is the context in which this passage appears: although often taken to be some kind of stand-alone mission statement about Witty’s overall views on language, in the context of the discussion, it actually serves to set-off the specificity of naming from language in general: naming is just one species of language use among others. This statement then, is inseparable from a consideration, again, of kinds of uses of words: to speak of a ‘use in the language’ (curious and significant employment of the definite article), is to speak of languages which employ different kinds of uses of words.
If I have one gripe, it is that Witty characterises philosophy as a whole as being nothing but the outcome of these processes of linguistic confusion. Contrary to Witty, I think that all philosophy worthy of the name has never been subject to this problem - in fact that philosophy has always been attentive to such issues in an implicit manner - and that his diagnosis of philosophy as suffering from such maladies is simply a misdiagnosis. Which doesn’t, of course, mean that the disease itself is misidentified - only misattributed. This doesn’t, I think, substantially impact the main results of the PI.
As in, that's the view you see Witty holding?
Hmm, I can't say I really recognize this in Witty - how language structures meaning (which is in turn structured by our forms-of-life), yes, but experience? That doesn't really accord to my reading. But with respect to the question: 'what sort of thing is ontology'? - I agree that Witty enables a really interesting re-framing of this question, in much the same way Kant does. But the devil's in the details, and without going too much into it, I've already read Witty as a linguistic materalist par excellence. Maybe this will come out in the reading more as we go along.
I'd like to point to the arch that stands over the text so far.
?1 gives an all-to-common example of a theory of language - that the meaning of a word is the object it stands for.
There follows a series of examples of, increasingly unconvincing, uses of language in which this is played out; slabs and apples and so on.
And now it is shown that even a name does not always stand for an object.
The quest to find an object for every word has failed, even for names. And yet language succeeds.
The method here has been to really look at the way we use words.
So, firstly the grammatical point is that words are not the names of things; and secondly the methodological point is to look at what we actually can do with words.
Here are the examples he provides, cases where the name has meaning when the object doesn't exist:
39. "Excalibur has a sharp blade" is a phrase which makes sense even if the parts to the sword are broken up such that Excalibur does not exist. if there needs to be something always corresponding to the word in order for it to have meaning, "Excalibur" would have to be replaced by names for all the distinct parts.
40. When Mr. N. N dies, the "bearer" of the name dies, but the name still has meaning. So he distinguishes here between the meaning of the name, and the bearer of the name.
41. When the tool named "N" is broken, the name "N" can still have meaning in the language-game which it is used.
42. The name "X" might signify nothing at all, and still have meaning in the game, as a kind of joke.
43. The conclusion:
The argument demonstrates that meaning is not a direct relation of correspondence between a name and the object named, it is something other than this. Witty assumes that this "other" thing is "its use in the language". We ought to be careful to notice that if this is meant to be a logical conclusion (as I have represented it), the logic is invalid. The demonstration is that meaning is other than correspondence, and this does not necessitate that meaning is "use", which is a particular instance of something other than correspondence.
So at 44, 45, Wittgenstein proceeds onward to exemplify this premise, that meaning is use.
Because people often conflate the two.
Whoa, that looks at first glance like an aggressively Kantian reading of Wittgenstein. You seem to be (as many do) simply replacing (1) transcendental unity of apperception = condition of the possibility of experience with (2) lebensform = condition of the possibility of experience (or meaning or whatever).
Not sure if you're writing quickly or have a genuine philosophical picture you want to defend by lebensform structures language structures meaning because this seems to be expressing precisely the sort of meaning is grounded in x picture L.W.'s project strikes me as - if nothing else - trying to teach us to avoid.
The post is, consequently, extra-weird because you're arguing against someone talking about how "language structures experience", i.e. invoking a particular sort of Kantian reading which you don't like because its content - not form - goes against your sort of Kantian reading. (i.e. Lebensform grounds linguistic structure grounds meaning rather than grounds "experience".)
I just flag this here because it's such a huge point and I'm not sure what you want to defend as your substantive commitments and how you find them expressed in L.W.
Quoting ?????????????
Well experience enables language enables experience; action enables language enables action. I don't see how we're going to get a clean split here. We're obviously jumping the gun before we get to discussions of rule-following and forms of life but I think that there's no clean distinction to be made between language, action, meaning, experience, rationality, practical know-how, familiarity, intelligibility, etc. etc. (I think what you're doing here - slowly refining your views as L.W. forces them out of you - "It's experience...wait no, that's too broad, it's ways of seeing and acting, what no..." is what the book is aiming to get us to do as readers.)
Hah, well, considering I read the PI as a Critique of Pure Language, I'm not exactly concealing my 'Kantian aggression' here. But it's important not to get too caught up in things here - I simply meant a paraphrase of this:
§24: "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."
Which one can roughly read as: the meaning of words (or meaning in general) is determined/structured/conditioned/'grounded' (pick your poison) by the use to which it is put as part of an activity. Whether this in turn can be read as a question of 'conditions of possibility' is neither here nor there, and isn't really what I had in mind when invoking Kant (although I will say that, in line with Deleuze's reworking of the transcendental, if pushed, I'd say something like: Wittgenstein attends to the conditions of actuality of meaning, not to their possibility; this is why I've drawn connections, in a previous remark here, to the similarity of Wittgenstein's approach to the question of sufficient reason: why this meaning rather than that).
That aside, what I did have in mind when I made my Kant comment was their similarities with respect to their treatment of illusions. For Kant, it's the nature of reason itself which engenders 'transcendental illusions', illusions internal to the functioning of reason which are brought about by the 'illegitimate employment' of the faculties. For Wittgenstein, there are similarly illusions generated by the illegitimate employment of language itself, the confusion of kinds when 'language goes on holiday' and attention is not paid to the language-games or grammar to which uses of words belong.
A last comment: I make no bones about reading Wittgenstein as a fully-fledged philosopher with a strong and systematic understanding of meaning and language. I simply don't buy his self-characterisation as some kind of para-philosophical flâneur, flitting about making local points here and there. He has 'theories' like any other philosopher, and I think one needs to offer 'strong' readings of Wittgenstein in order to make sense of his work. My 'side-comments' linking issues in Wittgenstein to Kant, to Sellars, to questions of sufficient reason and so on are meant to place Witty directly in the fray of philosophy, situating him on eminently philosophical terrain which he probably wouldn't have liked, but then, I reckon his own writing betrays his self-image, in the best possible way,
§1-§27: Imperatives (block! slab!)
§28-§36: Demonstratives (this, that)
§37-§45: Names (Nothung, Mr. N.N.)
- each of which allows Witty to deepen his discussions of use, grammar, and illusions. The PI has alot more structural cohesion than it might seem on first glance. that said, perhaps worth noting that what follows in §46 onwards - the discussion of 'simples' and 'complexes' - breaks with this structure of discussion. Worth considering why.
This all begs the question. Is there or is there not a real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate in the way that language is used? What is "language goes on holiday" supposed to mean anyway?
These illusions you refer to, are generated by misunderstanding. If the misunderstanding is a result of the way that language is used, we can see that language "goes on holiday" in two distinct directions. The one direction is toward a sloppy, uniformed misuse, but an innocent or naïve misuse, of language. The other direction is toward an intentional misuse, and this itself goes two ways, toward harmless joking like puns, and toward malintent, deception.
When faulty use of language is described by terms like "illicit", and "Illegitimate", it is implied that the misuse is willful. This, I believe is what Witty is trying to get at in his attacks on "philosophers" in general, the willful misuse of language. It's as if he believes that the willful misuse of language is a punishable crime, and he's calling for an Inquisition.
Ahh, I thought you meant that 'CPL' was one possible way of reading him, not that it was your primary way of looking at the work. In any case, I don't want to be a gadfly but I do think this stuff is important. You, Sam, et al. read L.W. in a very specific sort of way - let's call it a sort of 'anti-therapy' reading - and far as I can tell that colors how you have been discussing each aphorism. I see no inherent problem with this reading in 1-88 where he's laying the groundwork, though I think it will come to matter a lot later on. If it's alright with you - assuming you're interested in reasonable dissent, which can be entirely obnoxious sometimes on the web - I'll come back during the meta-philosophy discussion in 89-133 to hash out the underlying issues. Otherwise, if you wish to proceed with a strict interpretive lens, I'll leave off entirely.
Thanks, Valentinus. Yes, you're right. Wittgenstein is challenging these common philosophical assumptions.
Quoting Banno
I can't easily tell whether this is a criticism of my post or simply a comment, but some remarks on my method: I am trying to emphasise what I consider to be important and omit what I consider to be less important while trying to retain the overall gist of each section. I'm not sure whether this is adding much value to the discussion, but it's at least helping (or forcing) me to read the text more closely. I expect there to be more divergence and disagreement, and therefore (perhaps) more commentary from me, in the readings to come.
§40. Wittgenstein takes issue with one point of the "sharp blade" argument given at §39: "that a word has no meaning if nothing corresponds to it". Wittgenstein warns against confounding the meaning of a name with the bearer of that name. These are different, W argues, given that the meaning of a name does not die along with the bearer of that name. If it did, then it would make no sense to use the bearer's name after they die, because the name would cease to have any meaning.
§41. W asks us to suppose that "a tool with the name "N" is broken" in his language game at §8 (which is an expanded version of his 'block-slab-pillar-beam' language-game at §2 that also includes numerals and colours). W asks whether the sign still has a meaning when A gives the sign to B, and what will B now do in response? "Well, perhaps he will stand there at a loss, or shew A the pieces". W emphasises that one might say that "N" has become meaningless. W explains what he means by "meaningless": "this expression would mean that the sign "N" no longer had a use in our language-game (unless we gave it a new one)". W notes that this could also happen if the tool was not broken but given another name and therefore the sign "N" was no longer used. However, "N" might retain its use in the language-game if (e.g.) whenever A gives B the sign "N", B shakes his head in reply. "In this way the command "N" might be said to be given a place in the language-game even when the tool no longer exists, and the sign "N" to have meaning even when its bearer ceases to exist."
§42. W indicates that even "a name which has never been used for a tool" in the language-game at §41 could still "be given a place in the language-game", where, for example, B responds to the use of this name with a shake of the head. W states that we could imagine this as "a sort of joke" between A and B.
§43. [i]"For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word "meaning" it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer."[/i]
§46 marks yet another turn in the argument of the PI, and probably the most radical so far. Up to now, it can be said that Witty's concern has been to establish that there can be different kinds of uses of words (and not just one kind - naming, as with Augustine). That is, it's not just that different words have different meanings (as if words merely differed by 'degree'), but that the meanings of words also differ in kind: we can distinguish between types of words (with Witty so far having examined, roughly in order, imperatives, demonstratives, and names). Diagrammatically, we might be able to put it this way, with the right hand side of the diagram being what has been covered so far:
§46 onwards turns its attention to the left hand side of this diagram. So far, the question of exactly what is subject to different kinds of use hasn't really been brought up, other than saying that it is 'words' which have different kinds of use. In fact, the examples offered by Witty so far have themselves largely been individual words like 'slab!' or 'Nothung'. It is this assumption that is here put into question in the discussion after §46. The question could be put like this: what is the 'unit' of meaning? It is a word? A sentence? A proposition? In fact, is it legitimate at all to speak of a unit of meaning? And if it is, under what conditions?
This concern can actually goes all the way back to §1 where Witty already signposted his intention. To recall:
§1: "In [Augustine's] picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands."
As I mentioned earlier in my commentary on this line, I said that Witty will try and show both that (A.) words don't just correlate to objects (there are different kinds of words (§1-§45)), but also that (B.) it cannot be taken for granted what counts as the natural 'unit' of meaning. §46 onwards tackles this second aspect of Witty's objection to the Augustinian picture.
So we have the example at 48. Are the three G's three distinct elements, or are they all the same element?
But if we go deeper we see that the different squares are already distinguished by some properties. they are different according to their colours, and separated by lines. So if Wittgenstein were to adhere to the stipulation of "primary element", there could be no distinguishing one square from another by means of colour, and if we were steadfast to the rule, even the squares could not be distinguished one from the other by means of shape and position. Therefore the final question is moot. "Does it matter which we say, so long as we avoid misunderstandings in any particular case?" If there really was a type of thing called "primary element", as described, understanding would be impossible.
45. "The demonstrative "this" can never be without a bearer". W suggests that as long as there is a bearer, then the word "this" also has a meaning, regardless of whether the bearer is simple or complex. However, it does not make the demonstrative "this" into a name, "for a name is not used with, but only explained by means of, the gesture of pointing". This is logically similar to his remark at §38 that the word "this" is not defined demonstratively (e.g. [not] "This is called 'this'".)
46. "What lies behind the idea that names really signify simples?" W indicates that this has long been a common philosophical assumption, quoting Socrates in the Theaetetus and noting that the same idea has also been entertained by himself and Bertrand Russell.
47. W asks what are the simple constituents of (e.g.) a chair? Is it the wood, or the molecules, or the atoms of which it is composed? He notes "'Simple' means: not composite. And here the point is: in what sense 'composite'?" He reveals the answer: "It makes no sense at all to speak absolutely of the 'simple parts of a chair'".
W now speaks of his own visual image (e.g. of a tree) and asks of what simple parts it is composed. W considers the question vague: what sense of 'composite' are we talking about? "The question "Is what you see composite?" makes good sense if it is already established what kind of complexity - that is, which particular use of the word - is in question."
W anticipates the counterargument: "But isn't a chessboard, for instance, obviously, and absolutely, composite?" W answers that you are probably thinking of the chessboard's composition as 32 white and 32 black squares, but he notes that you could also say "that it was composed of the colours black and white and the schema of squares". This might sound very similar, but the point is that it has not been established what we mean by 'composite' here. You can't just say that it is composite without first deciding what we mean by that. As W says it is misguided to ask whether an object is composite outside of a particular language-game.
He concludes: "We use the word "composite" (and therefore the word "simple") in an enormous number of different and differently related ways...To the philosophical question: "Is the visual image of this tree composite, and what are its component parts?" the correct answer is: "That depends on what you understand by 'composite'." (And that is of course not an answer but a rejection of the question.)"
Simples are what had names for the early Wittgenstein (§46).
So the discussion of simples does follow on naturally from the discussion of names.
(Found the damn section sign, finally. )
What we count as simple depends on what we are doing.
So, like I said, §46 marks a change in the argumentative strategy of the PI, with Witty no longer looking at types of uses of words, but rather, more closely at what are considered 'words' - what is it that are 'used'? He begins with a passage from the Theaetetus, which is actually pretty damn complex. We can break it down like this:
For Socrates, to each so-called primary element corresponds a name (there is a one-to-one mapping between name and primary element). Names however, do nothing but 'signify' primary elements: they tell us nothing about them other than that they exist or not. Now, it is important here that primary elements and their names are associated with existence. They are ontological primitives.
Importantly, one cannot give an explanatory account of these primitives, because these primitives are what do any kind of explaining. It is only when primitives are composed together, that we can have 'explanatory language', language that does more than just name, and hence, determine a thing's existence. I bring to the fore here the question of existence, because the remarks that follow will contest not only what counts as a complex and a simple (which is what is often focused upon), but far more importantly, the very status of complexes and simples as ontological. In place of ontology, Witty will substitute grammar. We'll see what this means as we continue.
RRB
GGG
RWW
(but with the above "words"/letters replaced by their respective colours.)
Wittgenstein states that the sentence "RRBGGGRWW" "is a complex of names, to which corresponds a complex of elements. The primary elements are the coloured squares." Wittgenstein states that it is natural to consider these primary elements (coloured squares) as simple. However, he notes that "under other circumstances" he might call a monochrome square "composite" because it consists "perhaps of two rectangles, or of the elements colour and shape". Or, we might consider a smaller area "to be 'composed' of a greater area and another one subtracted from it". He notes that "we are sometimes even inclined to conceive the smaller as the result of a composition of greater parts, and the greater as the result of a division of the smaller". Wittgenstein now questions whether the sentence "RRBGGGRWW" contains four or nine letters, and whether an element is a type of letter (i.e. a colour) or an individual letter.
Reiterating his message from §47, whether these primary elements are 'simple' or 'composite' depends on how we agree to use those terms; what we mean by 'simple' and 'composite'. As he states lastly: "Does it matter which we say, so long as we avoid misunderstandings in any particular case?"
i believe the dichotomy of simple and composite at 47 ought to be treated as a digression. What he demonstrates is that it doesn't make sense to think of things as either simple or as composite, in an absolute sense, as these are relative terms. So this way of thinking is not applicable to "primary elements", which as foundational, are meant to be absolutes. We ought not to think of primary elements as either simple or composite. However, we can maintain the definition of "primary elements" as offered at 46. And this definition of "primary elements", as something which cannot be defined, is inherently self-refuting. So the question of how we ought to describe the primary elements, as either simple or as composite, in order to avoid misunderstanding, is completely irrelevant because primary elements cannot be described. Furthermore, since the notion of "primary elements" is self-refuting, we ought to consider it, in itself, to be a misunderstanding.
Since he says little about "primary elements" and speaks much more about simples and composites from 46-48, then I disagree that it's merely a "digression". If so, it's quite a long digression. Perhaps some of what you say could be deduced from what he says, but you're largely missing the point about meaning being undetermined outside a language-game.
No, I'm not missing that point, that's quite clear, as a premise of sorts. But there's a bigger point being made which extends into the ontological status of "primary elements". So I saw the discussion of the relation between simples and composites as a digression in relation to this ontological matter. Maybe I was wrong, and that shouldn't be classified as a digression.
But look at how this section unfolds. He starts 46 by asking about simples. Then he quotes Plato concerning "primary elements", and implies that there is a relation between "simples" and "primary elements". Now, it appears that "primary elements" are intended by those philosophers who posit them, to be some sort of absolute, as the foundation for all reality. But then at 47 Wittgenstein demonstrates that simples cannot be absolutes, as "simple" gets its meaning from 'composite", and the meaning of "composite" depends on the way that the word is being used (the particular language-game) It appears like he may be driving a wedge between "primary elements" and "simples".
So, consider 48, the example of the coloured squares.
Notice, that the primary elements are such (primary elements) simply because they are designated as such. The coloured squares are designated as "primary elements". But are they "the simples"? Yes, they are in this language-game, but this is only because the coloured squares are designated as primary elements in this game. In another context, the elements might be divided further, therefore something else would be designated as primary elements, and accordingly, the language-game would have to devise some other way to represent the primary elements of this game. Aren't the primary elements, supposed by the philosophers, to be the absolutes in the foundation of reality though? How is it that they have now become relative to the particular language-game?
Then the issue with such primary elements, involving the law of identity, is exposed:
What is identified as an "element", is it a type or is it a particular? Then he proceeds to question at 49, 50, what is meant by "element" in that sense of "primary element".
I think Conant and Diamond are incorrect in the way they interpret parts of Wittgenstein, but that's a subject for a different thread.
I don't know why you would characterize my reply to Terrapin as shouting, maybe because of the force of the comment, I'm not sure. In fact, I tried to inject a bit of humor into the comment. When I write I'm not only writing as a reply to a specific post, but I'm writing to those who might be following along, so I think it's a good idea to reply to certain posts, even if it seems to be not worth the effort as Banno suggested.
Good post. You are right to point out that Wittgenstein is arguing against the view "that "primary elements" are intended by those philosophers who posit them, to be some sort of absolute, as the foundation for all reality,". StreetlightX also notes the importance of these 'ontological primitives' in his latest post, with the elegant description of "a one-to-one mapping between name and primary element". However, I don't consider this to be an entirely new development, since W has been arguing against any presupposed 'occult process' or 'queer connection' between name and object since at least section §37. I maintain that at §47 and §48 he is drawing our attention to the meaning/use of the terms 'simple' and 'composite', but I acknowledge that he is also attacking the deeply ingrained presupposition of a 'queer connection' between name and object in the process.
So, as I said earlier, I thought there was some truth to what you said, but did not agree with your use of the term 'digression'. I also didn't really understand your reference to primary elements being "self-refuting".
Following §46, in which the question of the simple and the complex was bound up with questions of existence in Socrates, §47 will begin the process of substituting ontology for grammar: questions about existence for questions about uses of words. It begins with a rhetorical question that, tellingly, once again asks about the composition of ‘reality’:
§47: "But what are the simple constituent parts of which reality is composed?” (my emphasis).
To this question, Wittgenstein will reply that we can only make sense of the notions of the simple and the composite by reference to how the word(s) in question are put to use - and further, that there innumerable ways in which they can be put to use:
§47: “The question … makes good sense if it is already established … which particular use of this word is in question. If it had been laid down… then the question … would have a clear sense - a clear use”.
Note here that use and sense are almost used as synonyms: to have a sense - to mean something - is to have a use (in a language-game…). The idea is that it is only once we have sorted out the particular grammar of our use of terms, that we can begin to make sense of the very question of the simple and the composite: getting the grammar right is a condition of making sense of the question, and subsequently, of being able to provide an answer. All this can be paraphrased by saying, as Witty kinda does, that one cannot make sense “outside a particular [language] game”: language-games act as conditions of sense.
§47 (Remark: Relation Between Language and World)
Here is where I think things actually get super interesting, from an epistemological point of view: if grammar is a condition of sense, and there are innumerable ways in which we can employ grammar(s), what exactly is the status of grammar (hence language and sense) itself? For it’s clear that grammar cannot be ‘read off’ the ‘thing itself’: the chess-board in all its black and white glory provides no definitive answer - cannot provide any definitive answer - as to how to parse what is simple and what is composite about it. The grammar of our languages(s) do not 'naturally mirror' the structure of the world (if it even makes sense to speak of a 'structure' of the world).
This, again, is because sense is function of our use of words. This is one way to understand Witty's objection to 'philosophy'. 'Philosophy', Witty thinks, tries to read sense directly off the world itself as though some kind of mirroring relation: it doesn't pay enough attention to the mediating role of grammar in conditioning sense (hence the closing remark of §47, which derides the 'philosophical question' by 'rejecting' it).
Now, there are a few directions and conclusions one can draw from this line of thought, but one I'd like to nominate is what I might call the relative autonomy of language (or, on the flipside, the indifference of the real (to language)): the act(s) of making sense are relative - and can only be relative - to the concerns and interests that we have as users of language - our forms-of-life, without which we would not make sense. Another way to put this is that meaning must be made, and not merely 'found': it involves an active process of construction, which is constrained by, but not entirely determined by, the reality of which it (sometimes) speaks. This needs to be made more precise, but I make these quick remarks as extrapolations from the text so far, to indicate at least the spirit in which I read these sections, if not the letter. Also worth keeping this in mind for the sections on aspect-seeing later on in the text.
The analysis would be very different if a person were to approach the text assuming it to be a statement of 'the way things are' to if a person were to approach it as a normative statement of 'you should look at things this way (even though other ways are perfectly possible)'. In the former case, one can critique the text by arguing 'no, things are not that way, here's an example', but in the other, one would critique the text by saying 'looking at things this (other) way has the following use/value'.
A third way might be to simply presume that Wittgenstein must be coherent/useful to any intelligent reader at all points and so the exercise is to find that particular meaning in each sentence which is coherent to oneself, given all the other sentences, but this removes entirely the possibility of Wittgenstein simply not being coherent/useful at one point.
What seems to be happening on this thread is people taking one of the positions are arguing with people taking another as if they could actually resolve such differences.
I think any exercise such as this must first be explicit about its purpose.
It's actually quite simple. The concept of "primary elements" is self-refuting, because these elements are said to be things which nothing can be said about. But this is to say something about them. You'll se that at 46, primary elements are defined as something which cannot be defined. My opinion is that by doing this, the philosophers who posit the existence of such things circumvent the law of identity. They posit the existence of a thing (primary element) which cannot be identified because it cannot be said to have any identifiable features.
The claim here, by Wittgenstein is that the primary element may have a name, but no other means of identification. It is identified by its name. So he points out at 48, if this is the case, then what is being identified, what is being given identity, is the name, rather than the element which the name is supposed to signify. The element itself has no identity because it is assumed to be primary, so nothing can be said about it, and all we are talking about now is the sign itself its, position in the sentence etc., the context and relations of the sign itself. The meaning of the name is given completely and absolutely by its context in use rather than by any reference to the thing named. You could say that we've removed correspondence as the basis of truth, and replaced it with coherency. (But remember, the basic premise ("primary elements") by which this was done is itself incoherent).
What Wittgenstein indicates at the end of 48, is the consequence of circumventing the law of identity in this way. There is now no way to distinguish an individual from a type, as what is being referred to by a name, unless one indicates that it is an individual or a type which is being spoken about. A primary element is represented by a name and nothing else. But all of the same type of primary element is represented by that same name. The designation of "primary element" prevents us from distinguishing one from the other, so they are all the same, just like all instances of the letter R are the same letter R, and if we want to distinguish them as individual instances of R's, we must indicate this.
When Wittgenstein is talking about composite he is leading us in the direction of use, as opposed to some referent in the world (although there are times when the referent is obviously important). For example, "'Is what you see composite?' makes good sense if it is already established what kind of complexity-that is, which particular use of the word--is in question [my emphasis]." So, once we understand how we're using the term composite within a particular context of use, then "...we would have a clear sense--a clear use."
Note also when referring to how we might talk about the chessboard as being composite, that is, we might be tempted in some absolute sense to think that the chessboard is composite based on number of squares, colors, wood, etc. Thus, the point is that asking whether the board is simple or composite outside a language-game gets you nowhere. It's not what you have in mind that determines meaning. In other words, because you have in mind a particular association between composite and number of squares, colors, or bits of wood, that is not what gives meaning to the word composite. But if in a social context that's what we mean (which is based on use or grammar), then that use gives sense to the concept composite.
Streetlight you are correct to point out the relationship between all of this and epistemology. I think grammar should be seen as having the role of governing the moves within language-games, as opposed to the actual moves. An actual move may or may not conform to the rules of grammar. It follows from this that a correct move is in conformity with the grammatical rules. If we extend this analogy to epistemology, epistemology is simply a move in a language-game governed by the grammar in social contexts.
Quoting Sam26
What would measure a 'correct' interpretation? One which reflects what Wittgenstein actually meant? (how could we possibly know, and why would that matter?). One which reflects what Wittgenstein should have meant presuming his intention was to representent the way things actually are? One which is consistent with other things Wittgenstein said? (why would we presume to know what he meant by these further statements if the previous ones are ambiguous?). I just don't understand your use of the term 'incorrect' in this context and it seems to be heavily colouring the approach here (the use of the term, not the statement in which it is contained)
Quoting Banno
Same question. What measure are you proposing could be used to distinguish what 'is' going on in the PI from what some people simply 'think' is going on?
Quoting John Doe
Couldn't agree more.
I really think we should wait until §§89-133 to start worrying about trying to work this stuff out, because as you point out, any discussion we have of his grand intentions right now will be slowly gliding across the ice into the horizon. We've got to wait for the rough ground of actual text.
One thing we can begin to discuss once we hit §89 is why order the book the way he does - why start by going to work in his manner of doing things only to then double back and begin to discuss why he's doing philosophical work in the manner that he is. It's a fascinating structure unique to Wittgenstein. It would be like Being and Time starting with two chapters of formal ontology before getting into the introduction and then back again to formal ontology. (Here I agree with @StreetlightX that we have to read this as indicative of philosophical intention and not mere haphazardness.)
So what getting to §89 will do is allow us not just to discuss big themes but also to glance backwards at §§1-88 and try to understand those sections in light of new developments in the dialectic.
(As to why I - likely others - are obnoxiously posting big picture stuff without getting in the weeds it's just because I lack the time to be a more diligent poster at the moment and @StreetlightX is doing a bloody fantastic job delving into the material with a sharp intellect at a great pace.)
Quoting Sam26
Can we chalk this up to internet miscommunication (or my just being a lousy writer)? Perhaps a better way of putting the point I was hoping to make - cribbing the Conant & Diamond position which I take you to be not terribly well disposed to - is that (I think) what L.W. is doing in §§1-88 is trying to show Terrapin how and why he is wrong (or if you like trying to show young L.W. how and why he is wrong), and I think this is different from presenting a theory which offers a position which we can then argue contra Terrapin. If Terrapin doesn't agree to enter into the dialectic and take it seriously then I think from the perspective of what's going on in §§1-88, L.W. can't really offer him anything else. L.W. isn't offering the sort of thing we can shout at Terrapin, the way that a property dualist and physicalist do philosophy in the sort of way where they can shout back and forth at each other.
I'm not sure I can agree with your analysis here. I understand entirely how the bigger question of Wittgenstein's intention cannot be deduced from the text until at least after §89, but I don't think there is much merit in the exegetical work prior to that.
The early points about the role of ostension, for example, seem to hinge entirely on an assumption that Wittgenstein was solely attempting to knock down some kind of straw man version of Augustine's argument which later sections make it clear (to me anyway) that he was not.
Unless this group is happy to agree on a particular interpretation of Wittgenstein's intent before beginning, then any exegesis of earlier statements without reference to both later ones, and a purpose to the critique/investigation in the first place are just going to get mired in pointless debate.
At the moment it seems to be a list of "things I reckon about Wittgenstein". We might as well discuss whether we like the font.
Quoting Sam26
I don't see any mention of "grammar" as such, so unless this term "grammar" can be somehow related to what Wittgenstein is saying, I don't see how this discussion is relevant. He is still discussing the most simple aspects of language, ostensive definition (in relation to types), and naming (in relation to particulars). Grammar involves rules, and we have not gotten to the point where he discusses what learning a rule consists of. What I think, is that Witty has indicated that we learn all these language-games, ostensive definitions, and naming, without learning any grammar or rules at all. It's a matter of being conditioned in our activities, and creating habits. Whether or not these habits of language use which we develop, are good or bad, correct or incorrect, in relation to some grammar or rules, has not yet been discussed.
I think you should chill out Claran, and not be so dismissive of the earlier parts of the text. All parts of a book are believed to be relevant to the story being told, by the author, or else they would not have been included in the book. What Witty is doing in the earlier parts is developing the issues, the problems which he believes ought to be addressed. If you just jump into the middle of the book you will not even recognize the problems which are being addressed and misunderstanding will be inevitable. .
Even his Austrian background, viz., the culture in which he grew up is important to understanding the way Wittgenstein writes and thinks. Music played an important part in his family life growing up, and this too had an influence on the way he thought. So, the more you know about the man, the more you are able to understand his ideas. Reading letters he wrote to answer questions, looking at his style of architecture, examining his reasoning across a wide variety of his notes, etc, etc. All of these ideas are important to get a good understanding of his thinking.
There are obviously some spots in the texts that are very difficult to interpret. Even Wittgenstein looking back over some things he wrote wasn't able to always recall his line of thinking, so yes, there are things that are a matter of opinion. But I think as to the main thrust of what he's saying most people who have studied the texts can agree on many things, and other things are open to question.
When I give an interpretation of Wittgenstein I'm bringing in things that are not obvious to the text. For example, Wittgenstein wrote about grammar long before he wrote the PI, so his ideas of grammar are important to the text. It's also worth noting that there is a surface meaning to Wittgenstein, and there is a depth of meaning to Wittgenstein. Compare it to someone enjoying music in a very superficial way, as opposed to someone who has a very in-depth knowledge of music. You just aren't going to see or understand what they see and understand.
Streetlight has done a pretty good job for not having much of a background in Wittgenstein (if I understood his earlier comment correctly), but this is probably due to his philosophical background. If you can bring a wide array of thinking to bear on the subject, that too helps.
Some people just don't have the ability to think abstractly very well, and it's obvious who these people are when reading their posts. That's just the way it is. I'm not going to pretend that I'm good at basketball when I'm not, and if I do pretend, it will be obvious to those who know how to play, that I'm don't know what I'm doing.
Not at all. If Wittgenstein had intended, in these first sections, to simply lay out the problems, and if those problems were simply the linguistic ones that have been listed thus far, then what on earth would have prevented him from simply listing then clearly enough to remove the ambiguity. He's writing a work of philosophy, not a bizarre combination of developmental psychology textbook and crossword puzzle. First year child development students are not handed PI as their main textbook on language acquisition and told that once they've studied Wittgenstein's entire biography they should be able to decipher enough clues to finally pass their exam. If facts about language acquisition and use are what you're all interested in I can point you in the direction of a dozen child psychology textbooks which are much more clearly written, widely agreed on and well-supported. People have literally travelled the world looking at every language they can find, they've spent lifetimes collating all the data, testing theories refining them in the light of experiments, why on earth would you shun this entire collection of well-researched data to decode the reckonings of an early twentieth century philosopher with no background in language.
If, however, you want to follow through the absolutely fascinating insights Wittgenstein has on the nature of enquiry, the pitfalls of certainty and the fragility of the conclusions drawn therefrom, then this is the book for you.
Yet you've still failed to define what 'good' actually is in this context. How can you make assertions about what is 'good' and what is 'bad' without being able to define them? What is an interpretation trying to achieve, such that any could be good at it, and why would you rate that objective over any other?
Quoting Sam26
I presume from your hints thus far that you've read a fairly wide selection of interpretations of the PI. I can't really see how, after having done so you could reach any conclusion other than that we absolutely cannot agree on the gist of his thinking. I'm struggling to see a single point of non-trivial agreement between, say Hacker at one end and Horwich at the other, or Baker in a completely different direction. If you're seeing some significant overlap I'm missing I'd be interested to hear it.
Quoting Sam26
I'm afraid this is the sort of onanistic nonsense that really annoys me and I think spoils a perfectly interesting discussion such as this might otherwise be. It is obvious, to the uninformed observer, who is good at basketball because the object of the game is obviously to get the ball in the basket more often than your opponents. The player who achieves that (or helps his team to) is clearly good at basketball. No such equivalent exists for philosophy and trying to pretend that it does using some clandestine measure which cannot ever be actually tested is dishonest.
I'm skipping §48 because it's fairly self-explanatory [no natural way to decide on a simple], but also because the later sections that return to it actually hold the more interesting discussions of the example that it offers. We'll take it up as those discussions crop up.
§49 (and §50!) return to the curious invocation of explanation in the Theaetetus passage quoted in §47. If we recall, there Socrates says that so-called primary elements cannot be explained, insofar as they themselves carry out explanatory work. Explanation is a one-way street, from simples, to composites. However, having 'grammatically relativized' (if we can call it that) what counts as a simple and a composite in §47 and §48, §49 now explores the consequences that this relativization has upon this apparent one-way street.
The consequences are as one would expect: Witty grants that if something counts as a simple in a particular use of langauge, then Socrates is right: the (grammatical) simple cannot be something that describes, insofar as it is only named (names do not describe). However, what are simples in one instance may be complexes in other instances: this is what Witty is getting at when he says that:
§49: "A sign “R” or “B”, etc., may sometimes be a word and sometimes a sentence. But whether it ‘is a word or a sentence’ depends on the situation in which it is uttered or written".
- where 'words' correspond to simples, and 'sentences', to composites. Two examples are given. The first in which someone is trying to describe the complex colored squares of §48 (in order to reconstruct it, say), wherein to speak of "R" is to have "R" function in an explanatory role (An imaginary conversation: Q: "What squares are in positions 1, 2, and 7?"; A: "R"). In this case, "R" describes - it plays an explanatory role. In the second case, one is trying to memorize what exactly is designated (named) by "R" in the first place ("That is 'R'"). In this case, R is not something that explains, but simply names.
One point of interest here is that §49 answers a question posed back in §26, where Witty writes that "One can call [naming] a preparation for the use of a word. But what is it a preparation for?". It's here, in §49, that Witty answers this question: "Naming is a preparation for describing".
As usual, Witty is once again paying close attention to the types of uses of words, without which one can fall into "philosophical superstition", as he calls it here. Such superstitions being, again, the confusion between kinds of uses of words. Here we can see a bit better why such confusions happen: precisely because the role that a word can play is reversible: in one case a simple, in one case a composite, in one case a name, in one case a description - all depending "on the situation in which it is uttered or written".
At this point, Witty has nowhere linked grammar with rules (not saying there aren't any, but you're preempting, so your objection doesn't make sense).
Quoting Sam26
Cheers but I've been reading Wittgenstein on and off for years. Never quite in such depth, so this is a nice opportunity to hash out the PI in ways I've not done before.
Quoting John Doe
Heh, I'm basically doing one subsection a night, and at this rate, it ought to take about two years or so lol. But hopefully not every section will demand commentary.
Sorry, I know I'm new here and maybe I'm completely misunderstanding the sort of thing this forum is (if so, I apologise profoundly) but I really don't understand what you're aiming at here. You (and Sam) seem to be going through the statements one at a time writing what you reckon they mean and then dismissing any disagreement with your interpretation as being a result of the interlocutor's own (hopefully temporary) ignorance, and all will become clear later on.
Am I missing something major here, which those who've been here longer are aware of? Is it considered rude of us not to wait until you've finished your lecture before commenting? If this is supposed to be a thread where one or two people who've read the book guide a larger number who haven't through their own personal interpretation then I'm absolutely fine with that, I just want to understand how the thread works rather than waste my time (and annoying everybody) by getting involved in a way that is not generally acceptable.
Reading the PI is not a collective activity, discussing it is. Its the nature and conduct of the second part I was enquiring about, not the first.
Okay then. Well, thanks for disrupting the discussion to advise us that we're not discussing it properly, and then leaving without telling us how to discuss it properly.
Quoting Ciaran
As some form of explanation, I take it that you're advocating the latter approach? Could you provide an example? e.g. by saying more about this:
Quoting Ciaran
I'm sorry if I've offended you or acted inappropriately, It was not my intention. I don't think there is a way to discuss it "properly" so it was certainly not my aim to tell anyone what that way is. I think people should discuss it in whatever way satisfies them most, I just wanted to establish what approach was being adopted here, and I think I've done that now.
By way of explanation, I really don't see how anyone could possibly approach a text section by section without first establishing what reason there would be for saying anything at all about it. The words are what they are afterall. If there's no objective beyond reading them we might as well just write them out word-for-word. It seems here (perhaps, being more charitable) that there are just too many different objectives. Some seem to be writing what they think the propositions mean simply so that others can benefit from their 'wisdom' on the matter (leaving the deeper psychological motives aside for the moment). Some seem to want to take what Wittgenstein says as a statement of the way things are and find counterexamples. Some want to ask whether their interpretation is what Wittgenstein 'really meant'. All three approaches are flawed. Firstly what would be the point in reading the opinion of a random internet poster as if it were gospel? If you're studying, you'll need the view of an accepted authority, if you're past studying, you'll have your own views no less well-informed and the interest is in contrasting them. If the aim is to get at the way things are, then as I commented to MU, there are much better textbooks about language and understanding that are probably more accurate and certainly more easily accessible. If the aim is to get at what Wittgenstein 'really' meant, then we have slipped from philosophy to history (or at worst idolatry, in any assumption that what Wittgenstein 'really' meant has some authority to bear on the matter of what 'is').
Personally, I think the most productive way to run these things is to read the whole text first alone, take each proposition and discuss what it means to each other. After a few exchanges, move on to the next proposition. There's no right answer to be had, it's just a matter of seeing if what other people think about it sits well with your own world-view or not. Of course challenging their view is a good way of doing that, but it becomes pointless if that's done with the intention of getting to the 'right' answer at the end, it's certainly pointless if dissenting views are going to be snubbed as 'uneducated'.
But as I say, it's not pointless if people want to have "look at the size of my...reading list" competition. If that's the objective then it all makes perfect sense, it's just not for me, that's all.
Quoting Luke
Certainly.
What I'm saying is that I don't think the enemy here is Augustine, nor his conception of language, it is (or rather it is going to be) the type of language confusion which could lead to the sort of statement Wittgenstein picks out. Augustine does not present a theory about the way language is acquired in the confessions, nor does he set out to do so. Not only does he not claim that ostension is sufficient for all of language, but he does not claim that ostension is either this or that type of thing, his interest is not in providing a complete picture of either language or ostension in respect to it. Wittgenstein is well-read enough to know this. Wittgenstein is not attacking the idea that ostension identifies it's object purely by the act, he is using the very obvious fact that it does not to set up an attack on the type of thinking that could lead us to such a conclusion, using Augustine's work as an example. He's basically saying - look at this statement by Augustine, you could be mistaken for taking it as a serious description of the way things are because it sounds convincingly like one, but you already know is is nonsense. It is just disguised nonsense and so appears to be worthy of dissembling.
He's leading us through the process of identifying the sorts of statements which appear to be about something but rather have simply over-generalised, in a way a child knows is wrong.
The extraction of language from it's context that Wittgenstein is showing cannot be fruitful is not something that the general population do, it is not a thing which the uneducated need to be taught about so that they can become more knowledgeable, it is something that experts do to manufacture the very body of knowledge about which they are expert.
But that's just my interpretation.
I tend to agree. Thanks for your response.
Therefore, it is not by accident that Witty has not mentioned grammar so far in this text. He knows all about grammar but he intentionally has not brought it up. Look at the end of 48, is there four elements, or is there nine elements? Where is the rule (e.g. law of identity)? Well, no rule is necessary so long as misunderstanding is avoided.
Quoting Ciaran
Do you see the premise stated at 43? Meaning is use. If Wittgenstein is to give meaning to his work, his goal here must be to demonstrate usage. To simply list a number of problems does not give the meaning that demonstrating them does. That's why his method is to proceed from one example to the next.
Quoting Ciaran
Right, I think that's what we all want here. So what would be the point to skipping ahead and missing all this?
Quoting StreetlightX
That's correct, and the point being, yours and Sam's discussion of grammar is out of place, not relevant to the text, and actually quite distractive. It's distractive because Sam claims to know Wittgenstein well, and pretends to speak authoritatively. But Sam does not even seem to recognize that Wittgenstein has quite intentionally not brought up the subject of grammar yet. Witty is starting from the most simple elements of language, ostensive definition, and naming, and maybe we will see later how he brings grammar into the picture.
Quoting StreetlightX
I think that this is a key point, and this is where we probably ought to look for some sort of guidance from Witty, in the form of some kind of grammar. Unless there is some sort of rules, or conventions, which govern naming, then the descriptive terms which follow, describing the thing named, may not be appropriately attributed to the thing named. Grammar must begin with the most fundamental activity, naming. Remember at 48, the goal is to avoid misunderstanding. But if there is no strict rule or convention (law of identity), one might misunderstand whether the name indicates a type or a particular, whether there is four elements named, or nine elements named.
But Witty has talked about grammar. We've talked about grammar.
Yes, it's not the need to demonstrate that I was raising as an example, it's the nature of that which is demonstrated. He does not proceed from one example to the next. He raises a question then leaves it hanging, he sets up an obvious strawman, only to knock it down without triumph, he invites us to carry out our own thought experiments only abandon them... These are not at all the actions of someone wishing to relay to us some 'facts' about the way the world is that we can simply assess, each by its correlation with said world from the comfort of our armchairs.
I'm merely arguing against the analytical exegesis that seems to be going on here, not implying that the book should not be read in order. I'm presuming (perhaps wrongly) that everyone producing any volume of comments has read it at least once.
You have mentioned grammar. You have claimed that #47 is about grammar, and explained, "questions about uses of words". I do not think that Witty has used that term though, so we must be clear to understand what you mean by "grammar".
I see that I'm having a similar problem here, with the word "grammar" as what I had with the word "game". To me, "game" usually implies "play according to rules". But we determined that in Witty's usage, rules are not necessary for games. Likewise, to me "grammar" usually implies "rules which govern language use". You seem to be using this word to refer simply to "language use" in general, a broad sense without regard for rules. If you say that #47 is about grammar, then since Witty is not using this word, we must be clear and unambiguous that you use this word to refer to language use in general, and not to refer to rules concerning language use.
Consider Sam26's reply to your report on #47:
Quoting Sam26
Sam26 uses "grammar" as "having the role of governing the moves within language-games". So there is apparently ambiguity as to whether "grammar" refers to language use in general, as StreetlightX uses it to describe #47, or whether it refers to rules which govern language use, as Sam26 uses it. The point being that such ambiguity can lead to considerable misunderstanding.
I've read ahead, into the 50's and Witty does begin a discussion on rules. My opinion is that we ought to withhold use of the word "grammar" until Witty uses it, so we maintain consistency with his use, avoiding the ambiguity and equivocation which might arise.
It was discussed when we went over §29, and the boxed note after §35, where the term was employed. In any case, I've made clear my use of the term in my own discussions of those passages, so I'd prefer you didn't mistake your short memory for a lack of fidelity on my part. And who cares what preconceived notions you bring to the table? As with your initial confusion about 'games', they were irrelevant then, and they remain irrelevant now.
This strikes me as the appropriate amount of time needed to read the PI. :razz:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I think that we have to take "The Concept of Grammar in Wittgenstein" as the sort of thing you could write a dissertation about, like "The Concept of Freedom in Hegel" or whatever. He's using grammar in his specific, idiosyncratic way. Attempting to grasp what he means by this term is really an attempt to get at the heart of Wittgenstein's philosophy. Querying his use of this concept should drive at least one aspect our questioning.
As far as where we're at in the text -- Wittgenstein has mentioned grammar three times: §20, §29, and §35. He will not mention it again until near the end of the meta-philosophy section, §122. So what can we learn?
§20: "The sentence is 'elliptical', not because it leaves out something that we mean when we utter it, but because it is shortened -- in comparison with a particular paradigm of grammar."
Misleading translation. He says: "im Vergleich mit einem bestimmten Vorbild unserer Grammatik."
Here, "bestimmten" has a connotation of correctness; Vorbild a picture or model put in front of us.
§29: "Perhaps someone will say, "two" can be ostensively defined only in this way: "The number is called 'two'. For the word "number" here shows what place in language, in grammar, we assign the word. But this means that the word "number" must be explained before that ostensive definition can be understood."
Here, I take it he's merely making explicit what he has been doing in these opening sections -- starting to challenge what we might call the typical picture of what grammar is and how it functions.
§35: "Can I say "bububu" and mean "If it doesn't rain, I shall go for a walk?" -- It is only in a language that I can mean something by something. This shows clearly that the grammar of "to mean" does not resemble that of the expression "to imagine" and the like."
Continuing the dialectic of the challenge, we're beginning to see the difficulties inherent to conceiving 'meaning' as a mode of imagination or representation.
Thanks John Doe, I prefer an explanation over StreelightX's derision. The last quote is actually 38 rather than 35. I see that Wittgenstein's use of "grammar" is consistent with StreetlightX's, referring to language use in general, and inconsistent with Sam26's use of "grammar" as rules governing language. It was Sam26's use of the word in response to SLX's post, and SLX's failure to offer a correction, which threw me off, inclining me to object to using the term altogether, if it cannot be used in a consistent manner. .
Quoting StreetlightX
The point of an exercise like this is to dispel such preconceived notions. If you have no desire to assist in that effort, that's fine, but why would you partake in the exercise then? What could be your motive other than to provide a clear and consistent interpretation, pure selfishness?
Off you go, then.
Well, technically it's a note but as far as I understand it's supposed to connect up with 35. I double checked and it is definitely 35 in the Hacker/Schulte translation. Perhaps you're reading an older Anscombe edition?
The text at the point we are up to now is looking at another supposed basis for language, simples or atoms or whatever. Again, it is being shown that to name a simple is already to engage in a language game. And hence, again, the theory that language has its basis in simples is incomplete.
Having read ahead a bit, I would say that so it goes, until it is pointed out that there is a way of understanding a rule that is not given by articulating the rule, but shown in following the rule.
And this is why doing trumps saying, use trumps meaning.
I'm reading a pdf file online, Anscombe 3rd ed.. It's probably not rendered quite right, or I'm not understanding how the "marginal note" refers to the text as I see no reference point.
If you want it (free, legal, etc.): Latest edition (fourth)
Quoting Banno
I think this is a really great indication of where the text is headed though I have huge qualms with that last sentence. I guess we'll have to wait for the rule-following section to really dig into the matter.
Should be fun.
What do you mean by this?
Quoting Banno
Why do you think that Wittgenstein presents such a theory? If his goal is to actually discuss language acquisition and use, why has he chosen a half-developed theory from 600 years which no-one even believes any more. Do you think perhaps he was unaware of Piaget's, Thorndike's or Watson's theories on language acquisition, all popular at the time and nothing like Augustine's. Perhaps you could give a rough sketch of what you think popular opinion about language acquisition was at the time Wittgenstein wrote PI with a few sources. It might help to understand where you're coming from with this interpretation.
I'll ask you the same question I've just asked Banno, if that's OK. Could you give a rough idea of what sources you think Wittgenstein was working from when you refer to "the typical picture of what grammar is and how it functions". Form where is he obtaining this typical picture do you think?
Ah. Socrates.
Quoting Ciaran
Hm. The Archeology of Wittgenstein.
That might be an interesting approach, and if you ever follow through on it, I'd give it a look.
Well.. I do, obviously.
Quoting StreetlightX
Yes, I agree. Unless you're trying to claim that "the point" being developed is one about how what people think about the way language is acquired is wrong, in which case Wittgenstein's source for "what people think about the way language is acquired" becomes important. Otherwise what's the point? Wittgenstein saying "x is the way things are" becomes pointless if no one thinks that x is not the way things are.
It doesn't make any difference if you move "the point" from statements about language acquisition to statements about the nature of ostension. One still has to ask "do people think x?" before telling people that x is not the case.
If, however, "the point" is to show a method for dissolving any philosophical pretention, then the choice of foil doesn't matter, Augustine is as good as any. That's why it matters.
Quoting StreetlightX
Irrelevant to what?
And what you have to say might well be interesting; in order to find out, it needs to be said. That is, perhaps you might make your question about Augustin relevant by pointing to some relevance.
I'll defer to your much greater experience on the matter. I've certainly found discussing things with my reading group useful, having unfortunately recently been disbanded, I thought I'd try an Internet version. Can't say as my first impressions have been particularly positive.
Quoting Banno
Yes, the line of thinking obviously interested me enough to persue it, so it's not unreasonable to think it might interest others. What I'm questioning is whether spending time developing the idea is worth the childish put-downs any dissenting voice receives here, not whether anyone might be interested.
Quoting Banno
See my response to StreetlightX above, basically I think its a mistake to treat it as a book about language in any academic sense (by which I mean any sense that some problem 'really is' some solution). Any such text would have started with an summary of current thinking, not a 600 year old, half-formed strawman of an idea.
Well that's a bit rude. So you don't like his writing style.
Given his background I think it worth allowing him to play with the form of academic writing. Especially as this is a primary text, not something intended for those who themselves are unaware of such background.
It's not his writing style per se, although I do think that is relevant. It the structure of any such investigation. No one writes a treatise about how the sky is 'really' blue, because no one thought it wasn't. There's nothing to investigate, no problem to solve.
So it is with the analysis here, I think. If I could take this as an example of the sort of analysis;
Quoting StreetlightX
Who thinks there is only one kind of thing ostension points out? I mean, imagine asking someone in the street "are you always certain what kind of thing a person is pointing out?", who's going to say that emphatically, yes, it is always the case that ostension is clear about the kind of thing it targets. I doubt even half the ordinary folk would think that, let alone any actual professor of linguistics or child development. In fact, we know for a fact from people like Piaget, that they certainly were not labouring under such a delusion.
Wittgenstein's target is the sort of linguistic edifice which could have us seriously talking about language [i]as if[/I] that were the case, despite knowing full well it isn't. His target is in fact the exact thing that's being done here.
Says someone who reckons it's important if Witty correctly represented Augustine? And I'm accused of being too academic? Cute.
Repeat as required. But that's a repetition. Twice within a short section of the book I've fallen into a very similar misunderstanding. It's most likely not irrelevant. And, my interpretations of "game", as well as "grammar", which have proven to be inconsistent with Wittgenstein's use, are in each case according to the primary definitions of those terms in the OED. So, I believe I am observing the beginning of a pattern of idiosyncratic use. As a pattern, if it exists, it cannot be irrelevant.
Why else would it be that "I and the father are one"? You have to submit to everything both your parents have ever been right about. Honour thy mother and father.
§50 continues its engagements with the Theaetetus passage, this time, turning its attention to the question of existence (or ‘being’). Before going on it’s worth quickly noting just how much Witty has so far excavated from this passage: first, in §47 and §48, the relation between simples and composites; next, in §49, the role that both have with respect to explanation, description, and naming. Now, in §50, the question of the meaning of ‘existence’ with respect to simples and composites. All these terms and the relations between them - explanation, description, naming, existence, simples and composites - can all be found in the Theaetetus passage, and its actually pretty cool to see how much Witty manages to wring out of it in his own efforts to establish an alternative articulation between them.
Anyway, §50 pulls all these threads together and is, as a result, probably one of the more confusing if not brilliant passages in all of the PI. In it, Witty fleshes out the notion - one I mentioned earlier - that language-games are the condition of sense, this time, by paying close attention to the sense (and thus grammar) of ‘existence’. For existence too has a sense, and its sense is similarly conditioned by the use to which it is put. Hence the first part of §50, which begins by setting out a conditional (an ‘if’), which lays out a use of ‘being’ and ‘non-being’, and follows its consequences:
§50: “If everything that we call “being” and “non-being” consists in the obtaining and non-obtaining of connections between elements, [then] it makes no sense to speak of the being (non-being) of an element” (emphasis and ‘then’ added).
With what follows being simply the counterpart of this conditional (I’ll re-arrange the sentence to make it more obvious):
§50: “If everything that we call “destruction” lies in the separation of elements … [then] it makes no sense to speak of the destruction of an element” (emphasis and ‘then’ added).
As with the grammatical relativisation of the simple and the complex in §47 and §48, here too the sense of ‘existence’ is made relative to grammar, or, what amounts to the same thing, our use of words in a language-game. The conditional serves to highlight that "everything that we call “being” and “non-being” may well be otherwise; that is, contingent upon other grammars or uses of words. The second part of §50 brings the question of names back into the fold, and deals with one of my favourite bits in the PI, about the meter rule in Paris. It gets its own post.
My approach here is to simply read it as if for the first time, taking each passage as it comes, and reading it organically. These groups are best suited to first time readers, so that's the assumption I'm operating under. If I'm not dealing with things that are dealt with far later in the text, then yes, that's almost exactly the point (did I need to explain this? To which idiot?). If and when I do refer to later sections, it's something I try to signpost pretty heavily
Feel free to do otherwise if you'd like. But my plan is to stick to the same parameters of reading that I've followed so far. Which includes dealing with replies, objections, or other derivitive discussions.
If only there were some sort of aphorism where Wittgenstein lays out this line of thought. Of course, if there were, you should probably treat that section of the aphorism separately from the other part, because it seems like it would be important.
It's not, for me, that these issues aren't dealt with until later though. They arise directly from questions I think many people have with the text as it reads. My first question on my first ever reading of PI was indeed "why the hell is he knocking down some half-baked idea of language from 600 years ago?". To a good third of the subsequent arguments it was "yeah, but who thinks that anyway?" I think they're important questions to explore as the text is read. I don't want to treat it like a suspense thriller where we don't want to spoil the big plot twist at the end where Wittgenstein murders metaphysics.
Yeah, but I don't understand the relevance. Are you suggesting that commenting on the meaning of section 50 of Philosophical Investigations is not on-topic in a thread about reading Philosophical Investigations which has arrived at section 50?
My bad. Proceed, good sir.
In that thread there is much discussion of the relation between naming and descriptions. But here Wittgenstein says
In one way this seems to me to presage the assassination of definite descriptions in Naming and Necessity.
On the other hand, putting the pieces on the board in the right place, while not the competition, is part of the game of chess...
To measure the length of anything else, I hold it up to the standard metre. This is the game of "measuring". But I can't hold the Standard Meter against itself...
Or can I? Why not?
He has been building up this platform with his discussion of ostensive definition. In such demonstrations, the objects pointed to are used to represent the meaning, or use, of the words. Now we can remove the pointing of ostensive definition, and the very existence of the object is a "method of representation".
One might ask of Wittgenstein, if someone could, why is an object a "means" of representation, or "method" of representation, and not simply a representation, as is the case in Platonic idealism.
Here's what Baker & Hacker - always a good source when you're looking for the most extreme-bordering-on-parody reading of a given passage - have to say:
Like a lot of dubious Wittgenstein readers, I think that they arrive at the interesting question (What does this sort of truth-ascription amount to?) then duck it by claiming it is simply a 'moot' question for a 'confused' reader then proceed along unbothered by a question that - it feels to me - ought to at least puzzle us.
This is the point of the whole book. We did not ought to waste our time puzzling over it because the entire question only arises as an artifact of our language.
We can 'say' the Standard Metre is a Metre long if we want to, and in some contexts everyone will understand us. If everyone understands us, then the expression has done its job. Looking for what it is that we can 'really' say is exactly what Wittgenstein is trying to get us to stop doing.
Wittgenstein is simply using the actual Standard Metre as a way of showing how such confusions arise, not making normative claims about what we can and can't say.
Consider Paris is struck by some unprecedented and bizarre natural event and someone asks you to go and check if the Standard Metre is still a metre long, do you reply that you are unable to carry out such a request? Do you look at him in bafflement because what he has just said is meaningless? No, you take your tape measure (calibrated before the event) and measure the Standard Metre. If it is less then or more than the 1m mark on your tape measure you presume that something is wrong, not because you 'know' this as a true fact (you now can't possibly check if your tape measure is calibrated properly) but because it is sufficient for the current form of life that 1m is the length your tape measure says it is.
The point is to recognise that all talk about the truth value of the length of the Standard Metre is pointless.
Eh?
So it does make sense to ask if the stick is a metre long.
But we already know that it is a metre long - it was "baptised" as such.
If you proceed to ask the question, then how do you intend to measure it; to check whether or not it really is one metre long?
No, I've read some other people's opinions about the point of the whole book and found one which I liked. I presume you're aware that there is a huge amount of exegetical work already done on the PI. It's highly unlikely that anyone is going to have a view of the work that is entirely novel. None of us have to work out anything on our own if we don't want to. If you're actually at the stage of still working out the point of the book then you can I suggest you read some of the excellent expert commentaries. I'm really just here to see how what I think fits (or doesn't) with others. I think if you're here to 'work something out' you might be in the wrong place.
I'm going for the length. Can you change my mind?
Well, I guess that's honest.
Well yeah, do you think anyone else here has worked out their thoughts based on nothing but reading the actual text? I mean I'd admire their dedication to parsimony, but it'd be a bit of a daft thing to do given that other people have already provided a dozen different interpretations we can simply browse through.
If I may jump in to ask you a question, how do you personally typically verify if things are a metre long?
But that's not right. Even if its length were unverifiable, it might be a metre long.
But yeah, these days a few minutes on Google will suffice, hey?
Sorry, I'm not following you here, what do you mean by "a few minutes on Google will suffice"? The Internet is an excellent source of material but I think it would take more than a few minutes to get enough of a range of views to make an informed choice. If you find something you really like in the first few minutes then I can't see anything wrong with going with that, but I'd personally spend a bit more time on it.
Right, so what's preventing you from using exactly the same technique to measure the stick? It's sufficient for you to consider your plank (or whatever) to be a metre long, why has it suddenly become insufficient for measuring the stick?
No, it's a definition of a metre in a particular language game, in the real world. When you are measuring up for your shed, the definition of a metre is not the stick, it's your tape measure. Change the game, you change the definition.
https://academiaanalitica.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/kripke-saul-a-naming-and-necessity-cambridge-harvard-university-press-1981.pdf
P. 54, but also Lecture three.
No, the tape measures metre was defined by the Standard Metre. Who know what havoc temperature and humidity have wreaked on either in the meantime, but who cares? You certainly don't when you're building your shed. You're not continually referring back to the Standard Metre. What you are calling a metre is that which 'approximately' reaches the 1m mark on your tape measure,and that is sufficient. If you are concerned that some damage has befallen the Standard Metre, you might use your tape measure to help determine whether that is the case.
I say it is a length.
Not to the stick.
Not to the process of using the stick to measure.
I'm sure that some people care about precision of measurement other than shed-builders. Also, who knows what havoc the elements have likewise wreaked on your tape measure? But, anyway, your tape measure is not the standard. If the standard metre were damaged, then we might agree to use some other standard measurement instead, but for now the standard metre remains the standard.
'Metre' is just word, nothing more. There is no thing that it 'really' is beyond what we use it for. So my tape measure is the standard for the language game involved in building a shed, I'm not 'really' referring indirectly to Standard Metre when using my tape measure. Refer to what Wittgenstein has to say about analyticity. You're not somehow getting at anything more real by referring back to the Standard Metre than I am by describing the word 'metre' as meaning that which reaches the 1m mark on my tape measure. He's trying to get you to see that the exact type of problem you are dealing with now is not really a problem at all.
So what were you meaning by using the term "verify" then. You have two measures, your tape and the Standard Metre. You're saying that to verify your tape, you'd compare it to the Standard Metre, and you're saying you'd know which one to trust because of some property of the Standard Metre which renders its authority. I'm using the term "more real" to describe what I think you're thinking that property is. We could give that property another label if you'd prefer. The point I'm making is that the property by which the Standard Metre obtains is authority in the real world (whatever you want to call it), is not the same as the property that the word 'metre' has in any given language game. You seem to want to draw some normative conclusion from the discussion about the Standard Metre where there is none to be had (unless it is the impact on how you conduct philosophical investigations).
No. I'm having to guess that. As I said right at the beginning, no one has actually specified what it is they're trying to do here yet. I'm guessing you're trying to determine the status of 'a metre' in language as you seem to be suggesting that there is some determination that can be made over the question of to what the term refers.
Although if you're asking me honestly I suspect the reason why you're discussing it is because you're all trying to say things which indicate you've read and understood Wittgenstein at some level which sets you sufficiently apart from others to confer membership of a social group to which you wish to belong. But perhaps that's not entirely what you meant by the question.
Quoting Luke
I thought we were trying to avoid crass personal denigrations. What is that I've said so far that would justify your fake incredulity, that I don't agree with your line of enquiry?
Quoting Luke
What do you think I've just been discussing for the last dozen posts? Are you having trouble spotting the words 'Standard Metre' and 'Wittgenstein' in my posts, or are you so arrogantly assured of your own understanding that anyone discussing things from a different angle simply 'must' be irrelevant?
Quoting Luke
Yes, I noticed. So how are you determining what's relevant? The term seems to have done quite a lot of considering.
Pretending what? Are you intending that an invitation to comment preceeded by a insult is actually taken to be genuine? I've written what it is that I want to say on the matter. If I had the slightest impression that you actually wanted to hear what I thought Wittgenstein meant in this instance, I might say, but I'm not sure I see the gain for me in responding to an obvious attempt to get me give a response specifically set up so you can dismiss it as uninformed.
...but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number."
"Er, five," said the mattress.
"Wrong," said Marvin. "You see?"
The mattress was impressed by this and realized that it was in the presence of a not unremarkable mind.
Life, the Universe and Everything Chapter 7
Witty's reflections on the meter rule in Paris have been the cause for alot of confusion, but I think alot can be cleared up by simply placing the comments in context: Witty's revision of the themes in the Theaetatus passage. Let's first recall §49, where Witty grants that (something that grammatically counts as) a simple plays no explanatory/descriptive role: such a grammatical element can only named, and to name something, is not to explain anything. Next, recall his further point that "naming and describing do not stand on the same level", and that naming prepares the way for describing.
Now, if one treats the meter rule as having the same role as a name, the comment becomes relatively clear: the meter rule in Paris is that which 'explains' what counts as a meter (it is a means of representation), and is not something that is itself to be 'explained' (is not something that is represented). Witty makes this particular connection explicit:
§50: "The same applies to an element in language-game (§48) when we give it a name by uttering the word “R” - in so doing we have given that object a role in our language-game; it is now a means of representation".
There are at least two interesting points to make here. The first has to do with the disparateness of the examples, and what unites them. Consider: what allows Witty to analogize between a physical object (a metal rod in Paris), and a kind of word (name)? - Two seemingly very different things. Well, what they share is a role in a particular game - a 'game of measuring' in one, as Witty says, and a 'language-game' in another. It is the role of each element in the game particular to it that allows that element to carry the burden of explanatory work.
Unlike a Socrates, who would attribute to each element an ontological standing, having to do with it's being-a-simple tout court, Witty attributes to each only a relative grammatical standing, whose role in explanation is derivative or parasitic upon our use-in-a-game. Here, once again, is the substation of ontology for grammar that I mentioned in previous post: language-games as a condition of sense, including the sense of existence itself, which is here sucked dry of it's metaphysical grandeur and indexed simply to... grammar:
§50: "And to say “If it did not exist, it could have no name” is to say as much and as little as: if this thing did not exist, we could not use it in our language-game".
The second thing I want to make explicit is that the fact that elements can have roles also implies the contingency of those roles. A word can play one role in one instance, and another role in the next; the metal rod in Paris might be replaced down the line and no longer be the paradigmatic meter: in both cases neither the word nor the rod changes 'in itself' - only its role. So not only do roles relativize what can be said of a particular thing (were the rod in Paris just any other ordinary rod, presumably we could ask whether it were a meter or not), but so too can roles themselves change (the paradigmatic rod in Paris may become just another rod). Ontology is here doubly 'de-substantialized'.
(Finally, note that this mirrors again the discussion in §49 which comments on how words and sentences (simple and complexes) can change roles "depending on the situation in which it is uttered or written").
OC §10: "I know that a sick man is lying here? Nonsense! I am sitting at his bedside, I am looking attentively into his face . -So I don't know, then, that there is a sick man lying here? Neither the question nor the assertion makes sense. Any more than the assertion "I am here", which I might yet use at any moment, if suitable occasion presented itself."
It would be a cool exercise to trace the connections between these two lines of thought, but that'd be for another thread.
Also, I had a thread on here a while back about the meter, although approached from a very different angle, if it might interest anyone to read: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1114/the-example-or-wittgensteins-undecidable-meter (please don't reply to it, it'd be zombieing a very dead thread).
There is a normative claim being made here by Wittgenstein though, and that's the whole point. He's not referring to a stick, or a bar, or any such object, he is referring to "the standard metre". His point is that this object which is named the standard metre is itself a normative claim. The object itself is claiming to be the standard, the norm, as 'the means of representation". You might say that the standard metre is saying "this is one metre". Therefore to be correct when I say "this is one metre", I must maintain consistency with what the standard is saying.
Quoting Luke
It's not so much that we cannot say this, because clearly we can, but Wittgenstein is saying that it doesn't make any sense to say this, because the standard metre is itself saying "this is one metre".
Quoting StreetlightX
Actually it already has. Wikipedia tells me that "a metre" was redefined in 1983 in this way:
Right, so doesn't Kripke's solution require a fixed referent? It seems to me the scary thing about Wittgenstein's point - the 'it hurts my brain' part of it - is that there's no referent outside of our practices. The meter is a length and a process and etc. We can't boil down its intelligibility into something we can point to across possible worlds. So getting at how normativity and truth can function through human practices without reference to a natural or empirical meta-vocabulary would then be one of the major concerns of the book.
(I know this is said in the form of a statement but I mean it in the form of a question - 'What am I missing'? Enlighten me dear Banno.)
Maybe errata, but that's exactly the same target length as the meter was before. The changing of meter standards over the years follows a pattern of increasing ease of practical reproducibility and increasing precision of measurement.
If something which serves as the canonical representation of a size of a unit can have a well founded measurement uncertainty associated with it, treating it simply as an arbitrary definition seems to me precluded; if it were arbitrary in all ways, there'd be no quantification of error.
The fact that the "standard" changes by human intervention is the first indication that Wittgenstein's description of a "standard" here is not realistic. It is not an accurate description to say that the object which plays the role of "the standard" is itself the "means of representation". Rather, it is a better description to say that human beings use the object as the means of representation. That is because means only exist in relation to ends, so to leave the intention out of a description of means, is to provide an incomplete description.
"In this game, it is not something that is represented, but is a means of representation [...] we have given that object a role in our language game..."
Human beings use the object as the means of representation within a language game, no? So isn't he accounting perfectly well for the point you want to make? Or am I missing something about your objection?
SO I am in the process of challenging Wittgenstein in my own thinking. For that reason I'm going to leave this hanging here and continue with the N&N thread to see exactly how it plasy out.
Then I think this topic deserves its own thread.
Please start one. I haven't let my CPU enough time to process through that insight.
But, but, I want it now!
Is that about right for you?
Here's the point I'm making. "Human beings use the object as a means of representation" is the proper description. "The object is a means of representation" is the incomplete description. The former mentions "human beings", and this accounts for the intention which is implied by "means".
Wittgenstein's description has the object, which is the standard metre, saying "I am a metre". But objects don't really speak, and in reality human beings are saying "this object represents a metre". It's a simple extension of his description of ostensive definition, except now he has removed the human act of pointing to the object, so that now, the object represents the word without the need for the human act of pointing.
Hmm, but it's all linguistic. And all practical. Language is always-already in contact with the world: it is worldy qua activity - qua practice.
We've made 50, let's move on.
At 51 Wittgenstein asks what does it mean for an element to correspond with a sign. And, what does it mean to be mistaken, in the sense of using the wrong name, like using "R" to label the black square when black squares should be labeled "B". What does "R" standing for red squares consist of?
Were I to divide the PI into chapters, §51 would mark the beginning of a new one (which goes on till about §66). What distinguishes this section is that Witty will run through a whole series of different iterations of language-use, in order to pick out wide variations of such uses. If §50 began to establish that there can be different roles for words in language-games, and that those roles could be changed, §51-§66 will cash this insight out across a whole range of language-games. The idea in these parts is not so much to look for some underlying similarity between these uses (Witty will return to the issue of invariance later), so much as precisely to look for variance, and to acknowledge that such variance exists.
(These sections correspond very nicely to what @John Doe mentioned as Witty's general modus operandi, which he put as: ""It's experience...wait no, that's too broad, it's ways of seeing and acting, what no..." is what the book is aiming to get us to do as readers".)
So §51 is basically a series of rhetorical questions set out to lay the ground: in saying that the word "R" corresponds to a colored square, what exactly is going on here?: "what does this correspondence consist in? In what sense can one say that certain colours of squares correspond to these signs?" - one ought to read these question as: is there only one sense in which this correspondence can obtain? Or - and this is what I think Witty is driving at - are there are various ways in which such a correspondence is set up? Witty runs through two examples, the first of which he puts into question, and the second of which he leaves open to consideration, but their specifics are not important. What is important is that there is variation in what it could be for "R" to correspond to something in the first place.
Witty ends the rhetorical questioning with something like a methodological imperative: if we "want to see more clearly... we must look at what really happens in detail, as it were from close up." This more or less characterises the strategy in the upcoming sections. One resonance to hear in all this is something like an 'anti-theoretical' stance: something like - don't come up with an 'a priori' theory of correspondence - look and see what happens instead, and note how wide the variety of things are that count as 'correspondence'.
§52 is a cute little dig at philosophy, which, on Witty's account, doesn't engage in the 'close up' strategy he will employ here. He leaves the question open: "why not?".
§49. What does it mean "to say that we cannot define (that is, describe) these elements, but only name them?" Referring to his example of the 3x3 colour matrix at §48, W proposes the "limiting case" of a (one square) 1x1 matrix having a definition or description that is "simply the name of the coloured square". He states that "a sign "R" or "B", etc. may be sometimes a word and sometimes a proposition. But where it 'is a word or a proposition' depends on the situation in which it is uttered or written." W states that the word "R" might be a description or a proposition if it is being used within a language-game to refer to a coloured square. Alternatively, the same word "R" might be a word or a name if its use is being taught to others or to oneself, and where it is, therefore, only being prepared for use within a language-game. As Wittgenstein states:"...naming and describing do not stand on the same level: naming is a preparation for description. Naming is so far not a move in the language-game..."
§50. "What does it mean to say that we can attribute neither being nor non-being to elements? One might say: if everything that we call "being" and "non-being" consists in the existence and non-existence of connexions between elements, it makes no sense to speak of an element's being (non-being)..."
That is, if being (and non-being) consists in (or is defined as) the connections between elements, then it makes no sense to speak of the being (or non-being) of the elements themselves. This is clarified by his next statement:
"...just as when everything that we call "destruction" lies in the separation of elements, it makes no sense to speak of the destruction of an element..."
That is, if destruction consists in (or is defined as) the separation of elements, then it makes no sense to speak of the destruction of an element.
"One would, however, like to say: existence cannot be attributed to an element, for if it did not exist, one could not even name it and so one could say nothing at all of it."
It's hard to see the problem here, since it sounds perfectly sensible to say that if a particular element did not exist then we could not name it or talk about it. But this will become clearer with Wittgenstein's remarks on the standard metre which immediately follow, which he calls "an analogous case".
I won't rehash the standard metre discussion, except to re-quote Fogelin who interprets Wittgenstein here as saying that it makes no sense "to use something as a standard and simultaneously judge its accordance with that standard."
Wittgenstein then asks us to imagine a similar case to the standard metre in which a sample of "standard sepia" is kept hermetically sealed in Paris. W states that it will likewise "make no sense to say of this sample either that it is of this colour or that it is not".
Wittgenstein's reference to this being "an analogous case" makes clear that when he earlier said that existence cannot be attributed to an element, what he implied was that neither existence nor non-existence can be attributed to an element.
In the reference work 'Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations' edited by Dr Arif Ahmed, Dale Jacquette identifies a principle at work which connects the opening lines of §50 (regarding the existence of elements) with the standard metre and standard sepia examples. Mr Jacquette calls it the "polarity or complementarity principle" such that whenever "the predication or its negation or complement serve no purpose in a genuine language-game, the predication and its negation or complement are judged to have violated a rule of philosophical grammar". In the case of the standard metre, since it makes no sense to say that the standard metre is not one metre long, then it likewise makes no sense to say that it is one metre long.
Wittgenstein goes on to say that a standard or sample, such as the standard metre, "is not something that is represented, but is a means of representation". A 'means of representation' is a way of representing something. The standard metre is an example of this since it introduces, or prepares the way for, our use of the metre (as a length) in our language-games. However, once introduced, our use of the metre as a length is 'something that is represented'; something that is used within our language-games. The parallels of this distinction to the distinction drawn between names and descriptions at §49 are now apparent: preparation for use in the language-game vs. use in the language-game.
Hence: "And to say "If it did not exist, it could have no name" is to say as much and as little as: if this thing did not exist, we could not use it in our language-game.—What looks as if it had to exist, is part of the language. It is a paradigm in our language-game; something with which comparison is made. And this may be an important observation; but it is none the less an observation concerning our language-game—our method of representation."
Quoting Banno
I think this is right, but something is missing. Or it is not the whole story, rather. Surely, the Paris meter is a length... of one meter. But is it only a length? Or is it also, in addition to a length, something else as well? Well, Wittgenstein would say: it is the means of measuring a meter's length. But here I wonder: can it not be both? And if I were to say this, would I be disagreeing with Wittgenstein? Here's my thesis: I would not be disagreeing with Wittgenstein, because Witty is approaching the question of the meter rule from a very particular angle, and outside that angle, it's perfectly possible to agree with Banno that the meter is a length.
So, how to pull this have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too act off? Like this: it can be both, but not at the same time. To wit: note the peculiarity of Witty's discussion of the meter rule, which takes place in the context of names and descriptions, simples and composites. The whole discussion is basically a conditional: if the Paris meter is the simple by which we measure meter lengths, then we cannot say of it that it is a meter nor not a meter long. If its role is that of being the standard by which meters get their measure, then the question of it's being a meter cannot be sensibly posed. But, as per Witty, roles are anything but fixed, and are themselves context-bound.
So, as @Ciaran, rightly pointed out, when I'm measuring my shed with my tape measure, I simply don't give a damn about the Paris meter. It doesn't even have a role in my particular activity of measuring the shed. The Paris meter might as well be just another stick. And if someone, out of the blue were to ask: How long is the Paris meter? One could well reply: a meter long, give or take some minor variation in wear and tear.
But say I start to question if my tape really is a meter long. Maybe I bought the tape from a dodgy store. Then I invoke the Paris meter and I ask: is my tape of the same length? But now my friend, a committed Cartesian, comes along and opines: but maybe the Paris meter is wrong, and you can't even be sure of that! What can we say to our friend? It's at this junction, when the Paris meter is playing the role of a standard, that Witty's insight becomes relevant: the 'right' reply to our Cartesian friend is something like: don't be daft, that's not a sensible position to hold.
Another way to put all this is: the Paris meter is just another stupid stick. It 'is' neither a length, nor a process, nor really anything in particular. But, if it has, or is given, a role in a language-game, that role determines what we can and cannot say of it. And in its role as a standard, we can neither say it is or is not a meter long. Outside that role, we can of course say, with no trepidation, that of course it's a meter long. Witty's discussion is explicitly one in which the Paris meter does occupy that role. To put it yet another way: Witty's pronouncement on the Paris meter is not a general-purpose statement, and it would be a mistake to treat it as such. It refers to it only in its capacity (role) as a standard.
To say all this is to keep in mind the 'relativity' of 'words' and 'sentences' in §49, where the same thing can be a word or a sentence "depend[ing] on the situation in which it is uttered or written"; with the caveat that, depending on which role it has, different things may be said of it. And moreover, that something cannot be both at the same time. One could in fact call this a 'complementarity principle', a la Bohr on particles and waves - only here we're talking names and descriptions, simples and composites, lengths and standards.
Does this parse things out nicely?
Yes, I think so.
ETA: although I think the standard metre is a special case as its purpose is only to set the convention.
This relates to my 'verification' comments to Banno.
My opinion is that this will prove to be circular unless words are given occultish mystical status, because a word is itself a physical object. So we have one physical object, the standard, representing another physical object, the word metre, without any actual means of establishing this relationship.
I understand the problem with the meter stick thusly. We have a game of measuring, moves in this game consist in (metaphorically) holding something next to the meter stick and measuring its length. The issue we're discussing arises, then, when we interpret the meter stick as an thing to be measured using itself; the problem being, how can it make sense to say that the meter stick is a meter long when we're using comparison to the meter stick to measure? The alleged problem with this is that the length of the meter stick will always be a the length of the meter stick, so it's not appropriate to say we measure any length using it in the game of measuring using the meter stick as a standard.
I agree with that up to a point, if we can grant that measuring practices in general behave like the game I have described above, it wouldn't make sense to say that the meter stick was a meter long or that it was not a meter long. However, this doesn't do the full richness of the 'game of measuring' the Paris meter stick is involved in justice, and with appropriate recognition of nuance the paradox loses its bite.
The key thing, it seems to me, is bound up with what it means to compare an item in our game of measuring with the meter stick. If we grant that a comparison takes place between distinct elements, then it is inappropriate to measure the meter stick with itself. If we constrain 'comparison' to mean 'must be done between distinct units in the language game, one of which is the meter stick itself', then applying the meter stick to itself is not a comparison in the sense of comparison at work in the language game. But I believe it is a comparison in the broader language game of length measurement, standardisation and unit ascription.
Call the sense of comparison at work innately in our meter stick language game above C1.
The comparison which occurs between the meter stick and itself is not a comparison in sense C1, but it is nevertheless a comparison of length/extension. In the game of length/extension comparison, we can place an object next to another (metaphorically) and see if they are the same length, one ground rule of the game has to be that an object has the same length as itself, because we need to be able to see if lengths are the same or not regardless of what unit of length they are expressed in. It is required that a length is the same as itself as a constitutive rule of of the broader length comparison language game, because the game operates on its items as token length representations rather than as actual objects for measurement. Precisely, then, comparisons in this broader game are comparisons of lengths relative to lengths and not lengths relative to the meter stick. Call this comparison sense C2.
So in terms of C1 comparisons, the meter stick can't be held up to itself - this is not an appropriate move in the language game, but in terms of C2 comparisons it absolutely is; C2 comparisons operate on lengths.
The confusion arises when we take a C1 comparison and substitute in a C2 comparison without noticing that the scope of the discussion has changed.
The specific length of the meter stick doesn't really matter, the same confusion would arise if we were talking about any standard of length; this implies that the role the meter stick plays is just an example of a general pattern. We can play a game with lengths called standardisation, whereby we elect a privileged object which induces a length scale on all other objects, whereby other objects are associated a number that measures their magnitude. The same can be set up analogously for token length representations. So, at work in this language game of standardisation is a notion of ascription which isn't innate to the original language game or the length comparison language game. This ascription sets up a scale which interacts with C1 and C2 comparisons.
Scaled C1 comparisons are a modification of the first game where we additionally associate a number with an object besides the meter stick which is a multiplier of the meter stick's length. Scaled C2 comparisons are when we associate a number with a length itself.
We can then see that the meter stick functions in three ways which we usually treat as equivalent, it allows C1 length comparisons, C1 length comparisons are moves in the broader game of C2 length comparisons. It modifies C1 and C2 length comparisons by ascribing scales to extensions, which allow us to name lengths through the scale.
So the meter stick names a privileged length for scaling, it provides comparisons between distinct objects, it provides comparisons between possibly non-distinct lengths, and the understanding we bring to the functioning of the meter stick elides all of these subtleties... Only for Wittgenstein to present the nexus of their interaction as bloody confusing if you think about it. Which it is.
I think we agree. This is part of what I meant when I said that Witty's pronouncement on the Paris meter is not a general-purpose statement, but one that only applies to it in its role as a standard (what I think you're referring to as a C1 comparison). I also think you're right that Witty's presentation of the issue is confusing because he doesn't make this narrow application clear, and it can come across as a general purpose statement about the Paris meter as such. But a close reading will dispel any such reading I reckon. Particularly the fact that Witty says that the pronouncement does
"not to ascribe any remarkable property to it [the Paris meter], but only to mark its peculiar role in the game of measuring with a metre-rule."
And further on that it:
"is none the less an observation about our language-game - our mode of representation".
i.e. it is not a statement "about" the Paris meter qua metal rod sitting in a basement somewhere, but only the 'role' that it takes on in a particular language-game (such that, given a different language-game, where it might have a different role - or none at all - as with your C2 - the statement simply would not apply, and we could well say of it that it is a meter long).
Right, and I also think it's important to note the following section of §50, which possibly shows that the application is to much more than just the standard metre:
W's extension of the standard metre example to the word/name "R" here could indicate that the preparation/use distinction applies to all names in our language... I think?
Yeah, to all things that have the same kind of role that both names and the Paris meter occupy in their respective games.
We still have the unresolved problem of ostensive definition though. We have no clear way of knowing what "kind" of role is being represented by the name. The Paris metre represents the word "metre", but there is still a need to signify which aspect of it represents "metre"? And this requires a further language-game as already demonstrated. So if naming is the "preparation" for a language-game, this still requires an underlying language-game which makes naming intelligible. Therefore naming cannot actually be the preparation for language-games in general, though naming might be the preparation for specific types of language-games.
It appears like Wittgenstein at this point in the book is moving from language-games in general, toward a specific type of language-game.
§52. Anticipating resistance to his therapy, Wittgenstein states that "we must learn to understand what it is that opposes such an examination of details in philosophy."
Is the C1 comparison simply comparing the metre stick to itself (somehow)?
Also, I don't understand what the 'broader' type of comparison (referred to in your last sentence above) is supposed to include. Is this 'broader' comparison also included in C1?
What is "a comparison in sense C1"? What type of comparison is being made in the C1 sense if it is not a comparison of length/extension?
Are you saying that 'token length representations' are abstract units of measurement? Therefore, C2 comparisons are not made relative to the metre stick, but to the metre unit?
Are you saying that C2 comparisons involve the use of the metre unit, and so here comparisons can be made between the metre unit and the metre stick?
I'll try and make it mathematically precise.
By a C1 comparison I meant specifically 'comparing something with the meter stick', so it is a length comparison with the meter stick and only with the meter stick. I was thinking of it like placing something beside a meter stick in order to measure using it, this is one sense in which the meter stick can be used to measure. The way we'd use it to measure wood to be cut and so on.
Looking at the logic of the thing, C1 comparisons take the form of a binary relation M, which looks like xM(meter stick), where x is anything which can be measured except the meter stick (by construction). If we were then asked 'how does (meter stick)M(meter stick) function?', we can't say as a C1 comparison since x is now also the meter stick. The domain of x is all objects (stuff we'd measure IRL) except the meter stick. This means the meter stick cannot be used to establish its own length through C1 comparisons.
A broader sense of length comparison, C2 in my post, takes the form of a binary relation N where we have xNy where x and y are possibly the same. Comparing the length of two items tout court. The domain of x and y are all lengths. The picture I have in my head here are comparisons of magnitudes which represent distances, as if comparing the distance from 0->1 and 1>2 on the number line. Notice that this comparison doesn't need units to make sense.
C2 is broader insofar as it allows length->length comparisons and there is no privileged object which must occur exactly once in every comparison (like the meter stick in C1).
We can do these comparisons without actually associating numbers with the various lengths, notice that in order to set up the meter stick as a standardisation of length we have to be able to say that it is exactly 1 of itself long; this is because all objects and their lengths, then, are a multiple of the meter. So when we 'bring the meter stick to measure itself', we're comparing lengths irrespective of the standardisation (in the sense that we can forget the standardisation is there as it only sets the stage/scales the axes of the space of comparison), when we compare something in sense C1 it will always be done with respect to the meter stick.
Also notice that the ability to say 'the meter is 1 of itself long' is actually a little modification of the previous two senses, insofar as we have established the meter as a standardisation of length-length comparisons as well as object-object comparisons. This means that the meter plays the role of a dimension in length-length (C2) comparisons and the role of a... measuring stick... in C1.
The confusion here, then, is rooted in substituting the meter as a unit of length (dimension) into a comparison which only makes sense (by construction) while using the meter stick as a measuring object.
Don't we already know that?
Quoting Luke
I think so Luke, hopefully all my extra words helped.
I'm viewing my attempt to neuter the paradox from as beginning from noticing that it makes good sense to say that a meter is 1 meter long from a certain perspective. If we look in the game of 'unit standardisations of length', we can find yards and meters and lightyears and so on, if we look at the conversion rates of these we'll always find that they're in direct proportion with each other, and each unit is in direct proportion with itself with proportionality constant 1.
Once we've set the stage for the units of a dimension, we can largely forget that the units are there. 3 of a unit is always more than 2 of a unit and so on. The specificity of the meter doesn't actually matter for length comparisons, it's rather a preparation for length comparisons which facilitates those length comparisons through the ascription of numerical magnitudes.
The comparison of numerical magnitudes itself is something that can occur independent of the ascription of any scale. So we take something where a scale is implicit (Wittgenstein's measuring game) and then destroy that implicit dependence through a seemingly innocuous question - the question actually invites us to violate the established rules in a subtle way.
Speaking for a moment outside of just the PI, this 'forgetting' of the origin has always seemed to me to be bound up with some of the most interesting philosophical questions out there - when the contingency of origin turns into intra-systemic necessity, which then begins to function wholly autonomously from that origin. This is the genesis story of sense, of number, of the discreet, of systematicity as a whole. I even want to say of the infinite. But these are just side remarks. But I think the Paris meter discussion is one of the places in Wittgenstein where he touches upon this.
Just in case this breaks your mind as much as it breaks mine in this context, angles are actually dimensionless quantities - even though we can subdivide a rotation into regular parts arbitrarily, all of those parts remain proportional to radians. Which are dimensionless. That they're dimensionless is required by trigonometry; if you try to do trigonometry with degrees or what have you a conversion to radians is implicitly done in order to allow you to take sines and cosines and so on, otherwise doing something like sin(1 meter) makes the quantity dimensionally inconsistent (sine( 1 meter) = 1 m + (1/3)m^3 ...).
So it appears there are standardisations which don't come along with unit ascriptions, too.
That might be the crux of it. It's possible to understand angles as transformed ratios of lengths; but we could similarly understand lengths as transformed times (like lightyears). I don't know if it makes sense to see angles being derived from of lengths - we'd still have the ability to quantify rotation even without triangles.
In which case movement - difference - would still be primary, no?
I don't imagine there's a way to think about angles without requiring thinking about relative positions (differences of positions) of (probably the same) shapes in the plane, no. Whenever you draw an angle there's a starting point and an end point, or a comparison of objects in which one serves as a base.
Though, you can codify rotations as distinct entities, they can be represented as matrices (which are transformations of points). I imagine this step of abstraction is similar to the one going from '1 meter' to 'length 1' (like C1 to C2 in my previous post). In this way you can forget the 'starting point' by making it an arbitrary application of rotation. IE rotating something 90 degrees is still the same rotation even if you do it on a horizontal or vertical line, even though it does not produce the same shape.
Very cool. So much interesting stuff happens at this intersection. Part of me wants to say that it's the source of all paradox. But I'll stop this train here - too off-topic.
You've used this term more than once. What do you consider to be the paradox? I don't think Wittgenstein views it or intends it as a paradox.
I see being unable to say that a meter stick is a meter long, nor that it's not a meter long, based upon a hypothetical situation that otherwise makes sense, is a paradox. Perhaps it's better to say that it's extremely counter intuitive.
I don't think Wittgenstein really believes that we can't say a meter stick is 1 meter long, I think he's using the example to illustrate what can happen when we pay insufficient attention to the prerequisites for our language use; even maybe how asking a question in the wrong context; or a poorly formulated question; leads to batshit insanity.
This seems like a good moral to draw!
How would we know that, by referring to some paradigm?
".
I think he does really believe it. The standard metre's only role is to set the naming convention; to use its length to define the "metre" unit. It makes no sense to say that the standard metre is not one metre long, and it therefore makes no sense to say that it is one metre long. This 'polarity principle', that I referenced in an earlier post, is something W will raise again in various forms through PI and On Certainty (as a principle, not a paradox).
Furthermore, it is not only absurd to say that the standard metre is not one metre long, but also, the question or proposition of the standard metre's length-in-metres means that we are now playing the description (i.e. measuring) game, instead of the naming game. However, the naming game is, conventionally, the standard-metre's only game/purpose.
So what's going on at 51 when he says the following?
This is in the context of describing the language game of (48) in which there is a pattern of coloured squares, which are given signs. So how is this a "different" way? That language game of (48) is an exemplar, sample, or standard. It is a matter of pointing to a paradigm. Is he now saying that to understand that paradigm, we must refer to a further paradigm? Of course this would be just a recipe for infinite regress.
Or, is it the case that he is trying to lead us away from this idea of pointing to a paradigm? He hasn't yet answered what "correspondence" consists of, and maybe he has a different explanation, something other than pointing to a paradigm.
I read that post and agreed with it.
I agree that it makes no sense for C1 comparisons. What I've been trying to show is that there are language games in which it makes sense to say that the Paris meter stick is 1 meter long!
"To say that the standard metre bar is neither one metre nor not one metre in length is to say that the predication and its negation are both equally philosophically ungrammatical."
And in summary:
"The fact that it makes no sense to attribute the property of being one metre long to the standard metre bar, because it makes no sense by virtue of its language-game criteriological status to deny that the standard metre bar is one metre long, is supposed to be analogous to the fact that it makes no sense to attribute existence to elements because it makes no sense to deny that elements exist. As a point of philosophical grammar, now that Wittgenstein has moved beyond the picture theory of meaning, it is as meaningless now for different reasons to say that the elements exist or do not exist as it would be to say that the elements as simplest parts have ceased to exist because they have been destroyed, where to be destroyed means nothing other than to be broken down into simpler parts."
The author also cites another example of the same principle at work, where Wittgenstein (later in the book) rejects the claim "I know that I am in pain" because there is no "established practical role for the complementary or conceptually-grammatically polar expression, ‘I doubt that I am in pain’."
I also searched through OC for something similar, and the stretch of passages from OC 35 to 60 also touch on the same example of knowledge (unsurprisingly); in particular 35-37 and more specifically 58-60.
I thought there were more examples, but perhaps more will come up later in the text. Something to test and/or keep an eye out for, anyway.
I've just read through this thread with interest. I've found a number of points I'd like to clarify with their respective authors, but I think it would be disruptive to do so for points made way back, so I'll just limit my query to this one.
I understand (I think) the references you're making, but I'm not clear what it is you're actually arguing against.
Is it the idea, made earlier I think, that there are games in which the expression "the Standard Metre is 1m in length" may be meaningful?
If so, how do you square that with Wittgenstein's later discussion about holding the colours as samples in our memory at some times, yet at still other times we might refer to expectation (such as mixing chemicals). It seems clear to me that he is making the point, not that there is some absolute rule about a sample such as the Standard Metre, but rather that its rule depends on the language game? Could we not follow exactly Wittgenstein's later example I mentioned above to say "the standard metre is not 1m long" and mean by it "the standard metre must be broken because it is nowhere near my memory of how long a metre is". That seems to me to be a perfectly coherent use of the expression consistent with what Wittgenstein seems to be saying.
Or is your objection to something else entirely that I have missed? If so, I'd be grateful if you could clarify.
The way I read it, after posing the initial question of how signs and colours correspond, W states that it was presupposed that the correspondence associated with the use of the signs in the language-game would be different from the correspondence associated with the teaching of those signs. W indicates that the teaching of the signs consists of pointing to paradigms, where the paradigms here are the colours (or the coloured squares), and associating those colours with the signs/words/letters "R", "B", etc. However, how is this correspondence maintained in the use of these signs? We would presume that it consists of something other than pointing to paradigms (i.e. something other than ostensive definition). We can presume this because naming and description are on a different level; ostensive definition is only a precursor to playing the game. Wittgenstein then goes on to question how the correspondence is maintained within the language game (in use) after the terms have been defined: are mistakes possible, and what counts as a mistake? Is it a mental correspondence between sign and colour? etc.
Quoting Isaac
The statement we have recently been discussing is the seemingly paradoxical and/or law-of-excluded-middle-defying:
Quoting Isaac
Good question. This is apparently a common objection. However, as the author of the previously cited article notes, the standard metre plays a unique role, along with other standards such as colours:
Quoting Isaac
Fair enough, but I think in the context of Wittgenstein's use in the text, he is referring to the standard metre in its 'criteriological role' as a standard, and in this role/context it can neither be said that it is or that it is not one metre long. But perhaps this is a dodge.
To be honest, the cited article offers a defence against the type of argument you have outlined, but I didn't find it entirely convincing, so I will concede that this may be a possible context in which it could be said that the standard metre is/not one metre long. However, I wonder whether the same argument would hold against the current standard metre, defined in terms of the speed of light
Thanks for the clarification, so no one's trying to to say that one can 'never' say that the Standard Metre is or is not 1m long, only that such a statement would be meaningless in the context of it's being used as a criteria for what a metre is. That ties in a lot better with my understanding of the text than what I thought you might be saying.
Quoting Luke
I think it probably would. Imagine someone claiming to reference 1m using the speed of light (I'm really not sure about how this is done) came up to you with a stick taller than you and said "this stick is a metre long, I've just measured it by the speed of light". I think I'd still be inclined to say "no it isn't" based on my memory of the sort of length a metre is (ie shorter than me). Supposing that this person could demonstrate to me conclusively that they had indeed measured this stick by the new speed of light standard, I'd still be inclined to consider that I must be hallucinating, maybe some weird anomaly had taken place that I can't get my head round. Pretty much anything but agree that my entire memory of everything a metre is has been wrong, it's just too invested in too many language games now to be represented by just once source sample.
Actually, Wittgenstein is. At least, that's how I read it (at §50). More precisely, it makes no sense to say either that the standard metre is or that it is not one metre long.
OK, but in the context of what we've just discussed about Wittgenstein's reference to the many ways in which we check our use against samples, what is it about the text that makes you think Wittgenstein is being so categorical about this issue? It would be quite out of character with the rest of the argument, which seems to be entirely saying that there is no one way in which a sample is used, but rather a variety of ways depending on the context.
I don't want to jump ahead, but consider his later discussion of what it means to 'know' a paradigm or rule. Saying that the only way to 'know' what a metre is is to have access to the Standard Metre, would seem to be in contradiction to these later sections.
Yes, that's certainly how I understand it. I think that in the same way one can take "the lump of metal" and say that it does not always play that role, one can take the expression "one metre" and say it is not always (anymore) referring to "the lump of metal", at least not contemperaneously.
Considering we both agree when talking about the context of the discussion in the PI we should table the discussion for later I imagine. We could probably go back and forth about it for a long time, which would just derail this marvellous thread.
I don't think I agree with this. The nature of a "paradigm" must be other than a physical object which plays the role of a sample. Look at what follows, 52-55. He says we must look at this situation up close. Then he discusses a variety of different possible ways which people could learn the language-game of 48. So what he is doing is casting doubt on that statement of 51, the presupposition that the language-would be taught by pointing to paradigms. Now, when looking up close, he sees numerous ways in which the language-game might be learnt.
So even when he introduces the idea of "a rule" at the end of 53, he goes on at 54 to discuss different possible ways of learning how to play according to rules.
When he says "recall", I believe that this is a reference back to the same principle discussed at 31. So "learning how to play according to a rule" is not necessarily a matter of learning the rule. He again (like at 31) states the possibility of learning to play by the rule, simply by observing the play of the game, without actually learning the rule. In this case there would be no paradigm pointed to, in the sense of a sample pointed to as the rule.
Then, at 55 he returns to the idea expressed in the 40's, that even when the object which corresponds to the word is destroyed, the meaning of the word persists. So there is a sense in which the meaning of a word is indestructible. And he ends 55 with this statement:
Consider what this means. He has already explained that there is no such thing as a named object which is necessary for the name to have meaning. The name lives on, with meaning, after the object is destroyed. So names always have meaning even when there is no corresponding object. But now he is saying that there is something which corresponds to a name, without which that name could not have meaning. This something is what he calls "a paradigm that is used in connexion with the name in the language game".
So, at 56 and onward, he proceeds to discuss the nature of this "sample". As demonstrated at 55, and earlier, 40-45, this "paradigm" cannot be a object, because it must be in this sense indestructible.
Firstly, it needs to be emphasised that Wittgenstein draws a distinction at §49 between words and propositions or, that is, naming and describing:
W here depicts 'describing', or using "R" as a proposition. Another example of this is the 'block-pillar-slab-beam' language-game (2), where the words/signs are being used within the language-game as orders for person B to bring a particular stone to person A.
W here depicts 'naming', or using "R" as a word. We would not expect that person B in language-game (2) would automatically know how to use the words 'block', 'pillar', 'slab' and 'beam'. They would need to be taught how to use these words, and we would presuppose "that the use of the signs in the language-game would be taught in a different way, in particular by pointing to paradigms."
What do you expect the paradigms would be in the case of language-game (2)? I assume that the name of each stone would be taught via ostensive definition, by being associated with a pattern; with 'stones that look like this'. For other objects, it may not be about what the object 'looks like'; it might be what it smells, tastes or feels like, or something else.
Wittgenstein points out the distinction between naming and describing:
For a more informed opinion, Baker and Hacker offer this reading of the opening remarks at §51:
Quoting Baker & Hacker, Understanding and Meaning Volume 1, Part II
But the point is that the name is more than just a label affixed to the object. The name maintains meaning when the object is destroyed. So the "paradigm" by which the name is taught must be something other than the object. A simple ostensive definition, associating the name with the stones, does not suffice to account for this meaning which the name has, that goes beyond the existence of the stones. Therefore the "paradigm" by which the meaning of the names is taught, must be something other than the stones themselves. I think this is quite explicit at 55.
Is it?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, because the name is not the object. If an object is destroyed, we can still use the name. "When Mr. N. N. dies one says that the bearer of the name dies, not that the meaning dies." (§40) Or: "In a sense, however, this man is surely what corresponds to his name. But he is destructible, and his name does not lose its meaning when the bearer is destroyed." (§55) What is in question at §51 is: what is the correspondence relation between name and object?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, the paradigm is the archetypal object. Wittgenstein gives an approximate definition of 'paradigm' at §50:
Colours are an example of a paradigm for Wittgenstein. I would say that it is something which is used in the giving/learning of an ostensive defintion, e.g. "That colour is green". This appears to be what he means when he says at §51 that signs would be taught by "pointing at paradigms". At §56, Wittgenstein challenges the notion that paradigms can be mental rather than public.
No, it's not because the name is not the object. Consider that even if the name is not the object, but meaning was found in a direct correspondence between name and object, then the name would lose its meaning without object. So, because the name has meaning with or without the existence of the object, meaning is not a direct correspondence between name and object. And since meaning is something other than the direct correspondence of name to object, we must look to something other than the object to understand how we learn meaning. And therefore, this is evidence that we must look at something beyond the object, in order to learn how to use words (meaning is use). Witty says it is by referring to a "paradigm" that we understand how to use the word. This paradigm is not an object because that would imply a direct correspondence between the word and that object.
Quoting Luke
It's impossible that the paradigm is an archetypal object, because according to 55, it is impossible that the paradigm is an object. An archetypal object is an object, and therefore cannot be the paradigm. Here's what he says again:
So Wittgenstein is very explicit. The name has meaning when the object does not exist. The name cannot have meaning without the "paradigm" which he refers to here. Therefore we can quite readily conclude that this "paradigm" cannot be an object, not even an archetypal object, because the name would still have meaning without that archetypal object, and it can't have meaning without the paradigm.
Quoting Luke
I agree, he claims that paradigms cannot be mental, and argues this at 56 by referring to the failings of memory. However, neither can these paradigms exist as objects, which is argued at 55. This is why I said earlier that I think he must be referring to paradigms of use or something like that.
I've tried my best to explain my understanding of Wittgenstein's use of 'paradigm', MU, but it seems I've failed. A paradigm is more like a type than a token, if that helps.
This is how I understand paradigms also. It seems to me, if one "pulls out" the focus a bit to look at the whole section, the theme is consistently that things are neither this way nor that, but rather a variety of ways united only by the fact that the use serves some function in a game.
So, going right back to the first language game, Wittgenstein says that the paradigm 'might' be a table corresponding words with pictures, but it need not be. It may be simply that the word slab (uttered by a) produces the action of b handing a flat stone and a receiving it evidently to satisfied. Consider later (I'm sorry for the lack of references, I'm following this thread at work and I don't have a copy of the text with the) Wittgenstein mentions how we can tell when a speaker, even of a foreign language, has made an error by their attitude.
The idea behind 'meaning as use', I think, is that words perform something, they make something happen and it is by the evident success of this 'happening' that we check our memory of the meaning from whatever original act gave us cause to think it meant such and such.
We could say that the meaning of a word is maintained by the act of checking for signs of error in its use. All the while you bring the builder an object in response to 'slab!' which he appears satisfied with, you may be content that you have the meaning of 'slab!' in that language game. The moment he rejects what you bring with a frown, you return to the pile and pick a different object, you must have mistaken the meaning of 'slab!'.
It misses the point to put too much emphasis on the original act of definition, this is only what primes us to an idea of what a word can 'do'. It is only when we try that word out and experience first hand what is actually does that we can say we have grasped its meaning.
SO, for Kripke as well as for Wittgenstein there is a special role for the stick in Paris. For Kripke the stick is used to baptise a certain length as being one metre. Thereafter that length is fixed by the rigid designator "one metre".
Now the process of checking the length of any item in Metres requires making a comparison between stick and item. For Wittgenstein this creates an issue when it comes to asking if the stick is a metre long; this question becomes for him the same as asking if the stick is as long as itself.
For Kripke, the comparison is not between the stick and itself, but between the stick and the length that has been baptised as "one Metre".
"One Metre" is not a synonym for "the length of the stick in Paris". It makes sense to ask if the length of that stick has changed. But asking if the stick is still a metre long is not the same as asking if the stick is still as long as itself.
So I'm leaning towards agreeing with Kripke that there was something more going on here than Wittgenstein supposed.
Now I want to go and check this against the other points here, such as the discussion of colour swatches.
But it does make sense to ask such a question. Perhaps the swatch fades minutely each time a comparison is made; or some chemical reaction in the swatch changes the colour over time; or that the distribution of colour across the swatch is found to be uneven. Such things might happen.
Those who follow Wittgenstein here might say that this is all good; that given "Sepia" means the colour of the standard sepia, then the colour sepia changes over time.
Those who follow Kripke can also say that all is good; but that rather than the colour Sepia changing over time, that "Sepia" rigidly designates the colour in all possible situations, and hence that the swatch ceased to be sepia.
Now you can make your own choice, however it seems to me that Kripke's account is intuitively more appealing.
But plainly that is wrong; and that's why the physicists involved went to great lengths to isolate the stick and to maintain its environment. Perhaps one of the reasons that the stick was eventually replaced is that this proved to be an impossible task...
What was impossible? Making sure that the stick stayed one metre long...
How could it not? Anyway, I'm just trying to make sense of the text and of Wittgenstein's puzzling statements about the standard metre. I welcome your opinion. But I think I've said more than enough about it for now, and it's probably time to continue on...
Yep.
I don't understand the distinction you're making here, I'd be grateful if you could clarify.
Wittgenstein is obviously not suggesting a method of recording sepia, right? I mean he's not writing a book aimed at colour archivists whom he's hoping might take up his suggestion. He's saying if we were to say that such a sample were the colour 'sepia', then it would make no sense to ask of it "is this Sepia?". So it doesn't matter that, in the real world the colour might fade, that's just a good reason not to store colour paradigms that way, and indeed we don't. The point he's making is not what form the paradigm should take, but that whatever it is it makes no sense to ask questions about its existence or definition.
But maybe I've misunderstood what you're saying?
If the meaning of "one metre" is the length of the stick, then it makes no sense to ask if the stick is one metre long.
But it makes sense to ask if the stick is one metre long.
Therefor, the meaning of "one metre" is not the length of the stick.
So, as I think @StreetlightX argued, Wittgenstein's point holds; and for our purposes here we can move on; but that subsequent philosophical discussion - Kripke - has shown that there is a muddle in the middle of the discussion of the metre. Wittgenstein claimed that, If A then B, and he was correct; but we now know that not-A.
But what if the meaning of "one metre" is the length of the stick? :joke:
To say that such and such a thing is the paradigm for a particular language game is not the point here, I don't think.
So all I see Kripke doing (and I don't think he actually claims to be doing otherwise) is describing just the sort of process of props one might use to be sure what "1 metre" is means (his "baptism and then subsequent referral). Wittgenstein, however, was using the imaginary language game where the Paris stick was used as the sole paradigm for games involving the expression" 1 metre" as an example of what a single paradigm game might look like.
So I don't think the one position really opposes the other at all.
Well this is the problem isn't it? Where do we find an example or a sample of a type? An object is not itself a type, and therefore cannot provide such an example. And Wittgenstein avoids the spiritual (something mental, such as the example of type is in the mind), by saying that memory is insufficient, so what is the paradigm which exemplifies the type?
Quoting Isaac
Irony at its best. Wittgenstein says to understand this subject we need to look closer. But to understand what he is saying we really need to pull back and look at the whole book.
Quoting Isaac
I think we ought to pay close attention to this section because it seems to be strained, uneasy, as if Witty is manufacturing, creating something to cover over a problem. In reality, usually the person making a mistake does not know where the mistake is being made, and therefore the mistake cannot be exposed in this way. The person will need to be corrected by someone who knows. What is the case though, is that the person who is unsure of the ;language will have an overall attitude of uncertainty when speaking, but this does not expose particular errors as is implied here.
This discussion is at 54, and it is a continuation of what was said at 31, which was the subject of a lengthy discussion between Terrapin Station and I. Notice that Witty outlines two distinct ways of playing a game "according to a distinct rule". In the first way, the person is given a rule, and given practise in applying it. In the other way, the person observes, and learns rules through observation. In the latter way, we could say that the person produces the rule through inductive reasoning. Notice Witty's reference "like a natural law governing the play".
Here we have a distinction between a prescriptive rule, and a descriptive rule. In the former the person is given the rule and instructed to play in this way. In the latter, the person observes, induces the rule, and joins into the play. Now, in the latter case, when the person is trying to induce a descriptive rule, there is the issue of how does the person know when the observed play is following "the rule". So Witty proceeds to discuss how the observer might intuit, from the play of the players, when an error is made. This is problematic.
I believe that the true resolution to this problem is to be found through an analysis which is slightly different, more thorough. Witty does not maintain a true division between these two ways of playing according to a rule. In the latter case, the inductive rule, he assumes that the observed players are following prescriptive rules. This is a conflation of the distinct parts in the analysis. So when the observer sets about the task of inducing "the rule" it is assumed that there is a correct prescriptive rule which the players are following. But if the rules really are descriptive and induced, then there is no such prescriptive rule which the players are following. The rules are produced from induction, following the play.
Now the judgement of error is completely in the hands of the observer. The observer must exclude play which is inconsistent as not conducive to the production of a rule. So the comment quoted above is really irrelevant because it implies that the player knows when a rule is broken. But if the rule is not prescriptive, the player actually never knows when a rule is broken, because this is solely a matter of judgement by the observer who judges whether the play is consistent with the play of others.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, this is the point, error must always be judged by the observer. Your action is inconsistent with the action of the others (where the action of the others is the paradigm), therefore your action is in error (outside the inductive rule). In this way we can completely remove the inclination to assume a prescriptive rule, which the player believes oneself ought to follow.
It's interesting that you've looked at it this way round. You seem to be interpreting the person making the 'slip of the tounge' as the one trying to learn the rules. I always read it the other way around, the person listening is the one trying to learn the rules. They do not yet know to what each word refers (in this game), but, Wittgenstein is saying, they can still tell the difference between a rule-abiding play and a mistake. He's not, I don't think, suggesting that there is some single flawless algorithm for doing this, but rather a series of inadequate, partial methods which, put together over years, provide a sufficient knowledge to be getting on with.
Again we find the recurring theme. There is no single method, no flawless 'master key', just a rough hashing together of various approaches which sort of get the job done.
No, I interpret as you do, the person making the slip of the tongue is being observed by the person trying to learn the rules. The point I wanted to make is that the observer cannot reliably determine when an error is made, simply by observing the actions of the speaker who makes the error, as is suggested by Witty. In most cases an error is like an honest mistake, and the speaker does not know when an error is made. And sometimes the speaker may be acting deceptively (cheating), so the failing to abide by the rule is hidden. Therefore the observer cannot adequately determine from the behaviour of the speaker, when an error is made.
That is why I see this description as lacking, and so I offered a more thorough analysis which would make a complete separation between descriptive rules and prescriptive rules. Then we can describe the fundamental and preparative language-games (the games required that one might build the capacity to understand prescriptive rules) as if there are no prescriptive rules at all. The observer distinguishes consistency and inconsistency of the particular moves in the game, in relation to other moves. Consistency in many moves is conducive to a descriptive, or inductive law or rule, which becomes the paradigm.
However, under this analysis the issue of a "wrong" or "incorrect" move becomes problematic. These words tend to imply that the person has acted outside of a prescriptive rule, what one ought to do. Now I have removed the prescriptive rule altogether, and I have no basis for designating any particular move as wrong or incorrect, only that the move appears to be inconsistent with other moves. Can I say that a move is "wrong" just because it is inconsistent with the moves of others?
This is where I disagree. I don't think Wittgenstein is suggesting this at all. I think you may have added a 'simply' into your paraphrasing which Wittgenstein did not himself put in there. Nowhere in the aphorism does Wittgenstein suggest the process is simple. Nor do I think he could reasonably have meant as much. Wittgenstein learnt his native language as well as English. He must himself know full well how long it takes and so could not possibly have been under the illusion that each individual error reveals to us a rule.
I imagine it more like a long process, maybe on one occasion, the player is, as you say, cheating. Well, on that occasion we gain no insight, in fact we are deceived. But on another occasion we might observe a similar action being taken with signs of rule breaking (maybe other players spot the cheat and become frustrated). Eventually, after enough such occasions we will pick up the rules.
This is not to say we'd have a complete rule-book, just one that is sufficient. I think this is the meaning of Wittgenstein's later remarks about the sufficiency of signposts. We just keep refining our understanding of the rules as and when we see (by use) that our understanding is insufficient.
The point is, which goes onto the public meaning sections, that there need not be some repository of what is 'right' in order to keep this system going, just a sufficient volume of users all trying to copy each other.
Everywhere.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, but an object can be an example or a sample of a type.
Perhaps a dictionary definition will help:
paradigm
/?par?d??m/
noun
1. a typical example or pattern of something; a pattern or model.
This is what is pointed at during an ostensive defintion: a typical example or examples.
This is what he says:
My argument is that in most cases there are no such characteristic signs in the actions of the player who makes the mistake, as Wittgenstein's example suggests.. What I suggested as an alternative is that the observer would distinguish correct moves from mistakes on a basis of consistency. A correct move is one which is consistent with other moves. A mistake is an inconsistent move. So the observer produces laws of observation, inductive laws of description, as Wittgenstein suggests with "—like a natural law governing the play.——", and a move which is inconsistent with the inductive rule is designated as a mistake. In this way we do not have to appeal to "characteristic signs in the players' actions", as a means of determining mistakes. As I see this to be a faulty way to determine such mistakes. An honest mistake will very often not display such characteristics, and an act of deception will most likely not.
Quoting Isaac
This is not the issue. It is not a matter of mistakes revealing the rules. The person is observing the players, and learning the rules of the game through observations of the play. What is at issue is how the observer would distinguish correct play from mistaken play. It is not a case of mistakes revealing a rule, but a case of mistakes obscuring the rules. So in order for the observer to learn the rules, there must be a method whereby incorrect play is excluded as not supportive of the rule.
I find Wittgenstein's example to be insufficient. He implies with the example, that the person making the mistake will give us some indication that a mistake has been made, but this generally is not the case. However, he does say that there would be signs in the players' (plural) behaviour, and this would include one player correcting another player. This seems to be what would occur if one player makes an error and does not follow the rule, another player would offer a correction. For some reason though Wittgenstein does not describe this, nor use this in his example.
Quoting Luke
As soon as you point to a type, I'll believe that you've found an example of a type..
Quoting Luke
A typical example is not an example of a type, that's the problem. A typical example is a representation of the type, therefore it is not actually a type so it cannot be an example of a type. Where would we find an example of a type?
It literally is.
Ha, ha, I hope that's a joke. But just in case it's not meant as a joke, it's clearly not the case that "a typical example" is the same thing as "an example of a type". This is very evident because "example" is the subject, and "typical" is the predicate in "typical example". When I ask for an example of a type, "type" is the subject. Obviously, "typical example", and "example of a type" do not mean the same thing. In one case "typical" is the predicate while "example is the subject.. In the other case "type" is the subject and I am asking for an example of a type. So I am not asking for an example which is typical, I am asking for an example of a type.
Here are some examples. Let's say that "length" is an example of a type. There's a metre stick. How is that stick an example of the type, "length"? Or, let's say that "colour" is an example of a type. How is a red thing an example of the type "colour"? Suppose we have a red thing, a green thing, and a blue thing, similar to the squares in W's example, how are these differently coloured squares an example of the type which is "colour"?
Exactly what do you think the root word of typ-ical is?
The root is irrelevant, what is relevant is how the words are used. Luke doesn't seem to recognize the difference between using "typical" as a predicate, an adjective modifying the noun "example", and using "type" as a subject, in which case "type" is a noun. Looking for an example of a type is to look for an example of this thing which is called a type, and this is completely different from looking for an example which is typical.
W suggests that we can imagine a chart like this being used as "a tool in the use of the language", and gives an example in which its users each carry a copy of the chart in order to encode and translate signs. W explains how the chart could be used to describe a complex, where a user "looks up each element of the complex in it and passes from this to the sign", and then the person to whom the sign is given uses their own chart to translate the sign "into a picture of coloured squares".
W then observes parenthetically that "We don’t usually carry out the order “Bring me a red flower” by looking up the colour red in a colour chart and then bringing a flower of the colour that we find in the chart; but when it is a question of choosing or mixing a particular shade of red, we do sometimes make use of a sample or chart."
This reminds us of the strange behaviour of the shopkeeper at §1 who uses a chart/table to look up the colour red.
W ends the section by stating: "If we call such a chart the expression of a rule of the language-game, it can be said that what we call a rule of a language-game may have very different roles in the game."
I must admit that I find this obscure. Firstly, note that W considers the (whole) chart (or "such a chart") to be the expression of a rule of the language-game, rather than the individual signs or associations contained within it. In terms of its various roles, we can glean from Wittgenstein's example that the chart is used for the different roles of encoding signs and translating signs when describing complexes. I'm not sure what other roles there could be; perhaps there are different roles when using the chart for elements vs. complexes. However, perhaps just noting that the chart (and therefore a rule) can have more than one role is sufficient..?
[n.b. I've switched to using the 4th edition (2009). Earlier versions will have table instead of chart.]
As I hopefully made clear in my response, I don't see how this is an argument in respect of the text we're discussing.
Wittgenstein doesn't claim that the observation of some characteristic sign is the only means by which a student might learn the rules of the game, nor that it is the most common, it's just an example. An argument against this would have to consist of a demonstration that such signs were never given, otherwise, it's a perfectly valid example of the sorts of ways of someone could learn the rules of a game without being directly taught.
This is a point that seems to keep getting missed here, Wittgenstein is abundantly clear (at 109 I think, I don't have the text with me) that this is not an empirical investigation.
So, we can say that we can recognise the errors in game play by the signs other players give. This is something which we already know that can be "marshalled" to the problem. But as soon as you start getting into what is "mostly" done (which approach is used most often) then you're getting into empirical data. The answer to such a question is not something we know as individuals. It would require a study and so is no longer a matter for philosophy.
I don't think Wittgenstein is talking about different roles for the chart. He's talking about different roles for whatever it is we see as the paradigm. He's saying that, here, it is used as part of the game, a thing we do is to read off the chart, other places it is used as a means of teaching the rules, in others players simply deduce the rule by observing others play.
Thanks Isaac, but unfortunately I'm not satisfied with that explanation. You seem to have jumped ahead to §54. He doesn't mention paradigms at §53 (but maybe we also disagree on the meaning of 'paradigm'?). He says:
He actually says that a rule may have very different roles in the game. I'm having trouble imagining how this works. He indicates that if we consider the chart as an expression of a rule, then this somehow demonstrates that a rule can have different roles in the game. This seems to imply that the chart also has different roles in the game. But what are those different roles for the chart?
I don't think it is possible to analyse the book aphorism by aphorism. Wittgenstein develops thoughts often in three parts. First he will set up what he sees as a way we might be fooled into thinking we can 'discover' some fact by analysis. Second he presents a series of ways in which the problem can be looked at which show the first way to be nonsense, then he relates the exercise to his theme for that section.
So here, the target is the idea that a rule must come to be learnt by some single determined process. He lays this out using the metaphor about the mouse springing from grey rags (as ever though, his main target is the philosophy itself, as I think he is quite explicit about in that aphorism). He goes on to show, by using examples, that it is not this simple, that no single categorisation or general structure can define the way rules come about or are learned that is more simple than a description of such. This he relates to the theme here. That philosophy has no further facts to discover, that here is nothing more to do than 'describe' to eliminate questions that might arise from our desire to find some general rule.
Consider that the same rule may be expressed in various different ways. The table is only one way of expressing the rule. The table replaces the role of "memory and association". The various ways that the same rule may be expressed, are an indication of, or actually are, the various roles that the rule has in the game.
Yes, that seems to make more sense. Thanks.
That's the lead into 54 in which he discusses different ways in which it may be said that a game is played according to a rule. That's the subject Isaac and I have been discussing.
Quoting Isaac
The point is that the example is not a good example, and therefore does not properly exemplify the matter which is being referred to. First, you have not represented the example properly here. It is not an "example of the sorts of ways of someone could learn the rules of a game without being directly taught". It is an example of how a person learning the rules of a game in this way, simply by observation, without being taught, might distinguish mistakes from correct play. Since the example requires that the player making the mistake recognizes one's own mistake when it is made, and this is usually not the case when someone makes a mistake, it is based in an unrealistic representation of "making a mistake". Therefore it is not a "perfectly valid example".
It does if you see the matter being referred to as 'the method of philosophical inquiry', not 'a study of the way people learn rules', but these are just different interpretations of the text as a whole. I think that I'm arguing that the expression works for what I understand as its purpose and you're arguing that it does not for what you see as its purpose. Perhaps a full-blown discussion about the purpose of the section is beyond the scope of the thread.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Agreed, but as above, under my interpretation of the purpose of the example, this doesn't really change my conclusion.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There's a couple of issues worth picking up here.
First, how do you know it is "usually not the case" that when a player makes a mistake they do not themselves recognise it. This sounds like an empirical conclusion. Do you have any studies to back this up with?
Second, I think you're edging towards a view of rules that is very much outside of what Wittgenstein is trying to establish. If it is possible that a player genuinely not know they've made a mistake, and this is the case most of the time, then it follows that this would be the case for most of the players at any given time. If there's a rule that most of the players at any given time are not aware of, then where is that rule kept?
I've played many games, and I've made mistakes in relation to the rules. I've also observed others making such mistakes. When I make a mistake, it is because I did not know, or did not understand the rule. So when the mistake is made I do not know or do not understand the rule. Therefore I do not recognize that a mistake was made, and so I do not make any indications in my actions that a mistake was made (as in W's example), because I do not know that a mistake was. What is required is that another player point out to me that a mistake was made. For some reason, Witty does not exemplify this.
Quoting Isaac
Isn't that what "making a mistake" is though, not knowing that you were making a mistake? If you knew that it was a mistake, you would not proceed in that action which constitutes "the mistake". So it is impossible that the person making the mistake knows, at the time of making the mistake, that it is a mistake, because this contradicts the nature of "mistake". So, after making the mistake, if the person is to recognize that a mistake has been made, something must occur to bring to that person's attention, the fact that a mistake has been made.
Now consider the observer, trying to learn the rules from observation of the play. The observer is going to recognize that a mistake has been made by the same means that the player making the mistake recognizes that a mistake was made. So the observer doesn't determine that a mistake was made, from the actions of the player who makes the mistake, but from whatever else it is that occurs which would make the player making the mistake recognize that a mistake was made.
Quoting Isaac
Right, I think that this is an issue which will arise. What if there's a rule that only one of the player is aware of, a private rule? As I tried to outline in my earlier posts in this discussion with you, we can avoid that problem by making a clean separation between prescriptive and descriptive rules. If, all the rules of the game are learned through observation as we've been discussing, the rules are purely descriptive. There is no such thing as a prescriptive rule, what one ought to do in this type of game, the one that is learned purely through observation. Therefore, such a "rule" which is known only to one or a few players, is not a rule at all, by this definition of 'rule" because it cannot be observed as a rule. The activities of this one, or very few players, which you describe as players who are aware of a rule that the others are not aware of, are actually exceptions to the rules, and are therefore mistakes.
I'm rather fond of Vaughan Williams, and whenever I hear his music I feel good. I wouldn't presume that I therefore know how everyone else is feeling in response. That's what I mean by saying your claim sounds empirical. If all we're trying to work out is whether people tend, more often than not, to recognise their own mistakes or whether they need them pointing out, then we'd better just ask a load of people, perhaps a few surveys, a controlled study. I can't think why we'd sit in our armchairs and guess.
Notwithstanding that, I'm not seeing how what you're saying is not covered by "the player's responses". I don't have the text with me so you may need to correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's plural and so would be talking about the responses of all the players as a whole.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again I don't think Wittgenstein is in any way ruling this out, he's just also including the possibility of the player knowing themselves. Consider running offside in football. The player may not have intended to break the rule, but they only need look around to see that they have.
But none of this is relevant to the point and I don't want to get sidetracked. I'd rather just say yes, Wittgenstein chose a bad example. It doesn't change anything about the point he's making.
The point I see that you are leading toward is clearly relevant to the private language argument and if we're to keep this process on track (I'm guessing that's the aim, yes?) then we'd better leave that discussion for when we get there.
Yes it's plural, and that's exactly what I said earlier, "the players' responses" indicates a multitude of players. In my experience of observing games, and playing games, when one person steps outside the bounds of the rules (makes a mistake), that individual is corrected by the others playing the game. This is the obvious example of how an observer of the game would know when a player makes a mistake, that player is corrected by the other players. So, the issue, I wonder why Witty does not use this obvious example, and instead opts for an obscure example, which in my opinion (for the reasons explained) is not a good example. Why does Witty not state the obvious, the observer knows when a player makes a mistake because that player is corrected by the others?
Quoting Isaac
But running offside in football is not making a mistake, it's a perfectly acceptable play, the players do it all the time and they know when they are doing it. They also know that it puts an end to the play, that's the rule. If the player kept running, as if the play was not ended, that might be a mistake, the player didn't know he stepped offside. However, there is also the possibility that the player knew, and then continuing on with the play is an attempt to cheat.
The issue here is what qualifies as making a mistake. that's what Witty asks at 51 "what is the criterion by which this is a mistake?". This is what Luke was getting hung up on at 53, what constitutes "the rule", because the same rule maybe expressed in different ways, and therefore it may play different roles in the game. So which expression of the rule, or role, do we turn to in determining when there is a mistake? We cannot say that there has been a mistake unless we know what the rule is. You think stepping offside in football is a mistake, according to your expression of the rule, I think that this is not a mistake, but continuing to play after stepping offside is a mistake according to my expression of the rule..
Quoting Isaac
I agree that we're going off track, but the point to stress is that the question hasn't really been answered yet, by Wittgenstein, what constitutes making a mistake.
W asks how an observer can distinguish between "the players' mistakes and correct play" in this case. He answers his question:"There are characteristic signs of it in the players' behaviour". As an example of this, W asks us to consider the characteristic behaviour of somebody correcting themselves when they make a slip of the tongue. W states that this is recognisable even if we don't know the person's language.
As I said in my comments on §51 (way back now!), the next few sections basically iterate through a variety of ways in which which roles are established and changed, along with all the various effects that follow from these establishments and changes. §53 makes this clear off the bat, even though the opening statement can be a little ambiguous when read on its own:
§53: “Our language game (48) has various possibilities”.
Possibilities of what? Of dealing with the question raised in §51 regarding the correspondence between signs and things, hence:
§53: "There is a variety of cases in which we would say that a sign in the game was the name of a square of such-and-such a colour”.
§53 iterates through three such possibilities:
(1) Where people are simply taught that such and such a sign corresponds to such and such a square.
(2) Where the correspondence were ‘laid down somewhere’, much like, say, a pantone color chart:
And finally, (3) Where the chart is a ‘tool in the use of language’, in which a description of a complex refers to the chart each time a simple is referred to. As @“Luke” mentioned, this is the same kind of use of a chart that was mentioned back in §1. However, the puzzle for §53 - at least an immediate puzzle that jumps out at me - is the difference between (2) and (3). In both cases a chart is referred to establish correspondence, so why does Witty distinguish (2) and (3) with a ‘however, also…”?
The key difference seems to be this: in (3), the chart is used ‘every time’, as it were, one wants to make a description. This contrasts with (2) in which the chart simply serves as a kind of fall-back, where, although it is ‘laid down somewhere’, it is not always the case that we must refer to it. Perhaps in (2), we know the chart exists out there somewhere (maybe on an internet site), and we only look it up when say, a dispute arises. In (3), by contrast, the chart is immediately a 'tool in the use of language’: a tool without which the language would not ‘work’.
It is this distinction between (2) and (3) that allows Witty to begin to establish the fact that rules can be employed differently in a language-game. Hence the conclusion of §53, which moves in this direction:
§53: "If we call such a chart the expression of a rule of the language-game, it can be said that what we call a rule of a language-game may have very different roles in the game”.
In other words, rules don’t always play the same role in a language-game. They can play different roles, just as they do in (2) and (3). Finally, with respect to the meter rule discussion in §50, it can be said that that particular discussion hinges upon treating the meter rule like possibility (3), where the Paris meter, in its capacity as a 'tool in the use of language’, cannot be said to be either a meter nor not a meter long. Were the Paris meter be treated in a discussion according the possibility (2) however, one might be able to say that it is a meter long (or not).
Very nice. I overlooked the important distinction between uses (2) and (3) in my reading. This gives a lot more sense to the final sentence. Thanks.
Quoting StreetlightX
Just a small correction: I think you mean "taught".
Nice exposition, thank you. One point I disagree with though. You say;
Quoting StreetlightX
Unless I'm mistaken, you seem to be suggesting that 53 (and I suppose 54) are somehow answering the question raised at 51. I think rather they are contributing to Wittgenstein's overall argument that there is no more general answer to be had than a description. The difference is maybe small, but I think significant. It's like asking someone what colours cars come in and one answers "oh, all sorts, there's red, blue, green...", and another answers "there's red, blue and green.". The difference is only in the ellipses, but the implication of the former is that you'll get no better an answer than such a full list of colours as might, for all practical purposes, be endless. The latter, however, whilst being open to error still, is claiming some complete list might be drawn up.
I think this, together with many other such sets of aphorisms, don't make much sense unless viewed in the former sense.
In order to see more clearly we must look close up. (51)
But what prevents us from looking close up in philosophy? (52)
Well, rules play a different role in different games, there's no generalisable rule for us to find beyond simply describing it. (53)
And sometimes, the only way we know these rules is by observing the other players in each and every game. (54)
So that is what prevent us from looking close up in philosophy, the desire to find some generalisable rule rather than to describe.
:up: - corrected.
Quoting Isaac
Yeah, that's fair. A big part of what I'm trying to do here is establish the 'flow' of the PI, to show the threads that weave from one part to the next, and sometimes it does mean I obscure global implications for local connections, so I appreciate the corrective.
Also, nice to have you on board!
§54 serves to illustrate the point arrived at at the end of §53: that rules can themselves have different roles in a (language) game. Hence the reference to "kinds of cases where a game is played according to particular rule" - not just 'cases', mind you, but kinds of cases. The rest of §54 iterates though different kinds of roles that rules can play - as an aid in teaching the game; as a tool of the game itself (as with possibility (3) in §53); as what is observed from watching play.
In each case, the idea is that rules play a different role in the game; with the implication that there is no uniform role that rules play across different language games: one must get 'close up' (§51) to figure out exactly which role (or roles?) rules play.
Yes, I see what you're doing now. It's a tricky balance to strike I think, so I hope you'll take any future such wide-focus comments I may make as additions, rather than corrections.
Quoting StreetlightX
Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.
I wouldn't say that Streetlight is suggesting that this question is being answered. "Dealing with the question" does not necessarily imply answering it. Witty says that we must look at it in detail, from "close to". Putting something under a microscope is a way of dealing with it, but it doesn't necessarily answer the questions we have about it. What is often the case is that we have to compare the up close view with the far back view, and often reciprocate back and forth with our attention, to establish a relationship between the aspects observed from up close and the aspects observed from far back.
Consider the (2) example, where the chart is as Streetlight calls a "fall-back". If we were looking only up close, we might not even observe the existence of the chart, because we might not see any of the instances of referring to it. And such instances, if observed, might be obscured and taken as irrelevant because they are few and far between and the chart may not be recognizable as such. Therefore we wouldn't even know that such a chart existed until we compare the far back look and see a pattern of reference. Then we could turn back to an even closer close-up to focus directly on the chart, and see exactly what the chart consists of.
Here's something I think we ought to take note of. At 51 he says we must look at the detail, the up-close. Then at 52 he says:
"But first we must learn to understand what it is that opposes such an examination of details in philosophy."
So the expose which follows in the next section may be an explanation of this opposition to examining detail, rather than an actual examination of the detail. Think of the "particular rule", as the thing to be examined in detail. Are we examining this thing in detail, or are we examining the opposition to examining it?
For me, the most important aspect of Wittgenstein's rule-following analysis, is not only the idea of the complexity of rule-following within language-games, but the necessary connection of rule-following with actions. Hence, the importance of "[learning] the game by watching how others play." So the rule, for e.g., thats bishops move diagonally, isn't a rule apart from the actions associated with the rule. And of course it's those actions that determine what's correct and incorrect, i.e., "[the] characteristic signs of it [correct and incorrect] in the player's behaviour." And obviously it can't just be any behavior, but the behavior of the social group in relation to the game.
It's also interesting that Wittgenstein points out how that same behavior can be recognized in languages we're not familiar with, which he mentions in connection with a slip of the tongue. It's almost as if there are bedrock behaviors that are associated with all acting, i.e., acting that transcends language in some respect.
§55
The first quote of 55, it seems to me, is referring to his ideas in the Tractatus (not exclusively of course), i.e., his picture theory of language. So true propositions, in the Tractatus, refer to the idea that the proposition (the names - primitive signs) match up with facts (objects - the primitives that make up facts). Hence, the name corresponds to the object, which then gives meaning to the sign.
So part of what Wittgenstein is talking about in terms of the primitive language-game given at the beginning of the PI, is in direct opposition to his thinking in the Tractatus. He demonstrates in the PI using various analogies and examples how the idea of meaning is not, for the most part, connected up with a sign associated with an object. That meaning still has sense even if the object that corresponds to the sign doesn't exist, or is destroyed. Where does that sense reside? It resides in the complexity of the language-game, grammar, rules, and actions (correct and incorrect) within social contexts, all of these work together to establish meaning.
My interpretation is not necessarily exegetical, but seen from a broader perspective.
[quote= Wittgenstein 55] —An example of something corresponding to the name, and without which it would have no meaning, is a paradigm that is used in connexion with the name in the language-game.[/quote]
As per my discussion with Luke, the paradigm referred to here cannot be an object, because the word still has meaning when the object is destroyed. How do you think it is, that something so general, and abstract, as "grammar, rules, and actions (correct and incorrect) within social contexts", is "a paradigm", as "paradigm" is used above? Remember, at this point in the text Wittgenstein is considering a specific problem which is an attitude of opposition by philosophers, toward looking up close, at details, and our example is the "particular rule".
§55 deepens, ever so slightly, the distinction made in §53 between a sample being a 'tool in the use of language' - one being used immediately in a language-game (like a color from a chart each time a description is given), and a name where no such sample is invoked.
(A distinction that roughly corresponds to what I referred to as possibility (3) and possibilities (1) and (2) in my commentary of §53).
Again at stake here is something of a conditional: if a sample - or what Witty here also calls a paradigm, like the vault-locked Sepia sample or paradigmatic Paris meter - is used 'in conjunction with a name in a language-game', then it must actually exist in order to be spoken of sensically (if 'exist' is too fraught a word, one can say instead something like: there must really be a sample without which a language which invokes it could not get off the ground). Contrapositively, if no such sample is involved in a particular language game, then there is no need for it to actually exist in order for me to speak sensically.
This discussion actually hearkens back to §40-§45, where the question of whether words need 'bearers' in order to have meaning was raised. There, Witty concluded that no, they do not. This, however, is something of an exception: they don't ... unless a sample is involved in the use of words.
One might think of it this way: there are games in which the point is to check if something measures up to the sample; in the absence of such a sample, there would be no point to the game - there would be no meaning to our words. But not every game is like this. When I say "Nothung has a sharp blade" (§44), there is no need that Nothung actually be around, and in one piece, for this sentence to have meaning; but something like "is it the same length as Nothung?" would require there to be Nothung around to measure it against (notwithstanding a question like 'is it the same length as Nothung was?).*
*Note: I suspect older translations have Nothung rendered as 'Excalibur', though I could be wrong about this.
I know you're going beyond the text somewhat, but there are some ambiguities with this reading, I think. First, I'm not clear on what it means to say that actions 'determine' what is correct and incorrect: is it not the case that actions are correct or incorrect? (i.e. you seem to introduce a temporal logic - actions > in/correctness - where I'm not sure there is one; But perhaps you don't quite mean this and I'm over-reading). Second, the "it" in the "the characteristic signs of it" seems to refer to 'distinguishing between mistakes and correct play' and not instances of correct and incorrect play - the act of distinction, and not the objects of the distinction, as in, not:
(1) "[the] characteristic signs of it [correct and incorrect] in the player's behaviour"; But:
(2) "[the] characteristic signs of it [distinguishing correct and incorrect play] in the player's behaviour";
This insofar as the immidiately preceeding sentence is:
"But how does the observer distinguish in this case between players’ mistakes and correct play? - There are characteristic signs of it in the players’ behaviour": the 'it' seems to refer to the verb - the act of distinguishing in/correct play by players in the game, and not individual correct and incorrect play in themselves.
Anyway, just a pair of observations that seemed to stand out to me.
What I mean by "...the actions determine what's correct or incorrect" is that the actions within the social context is the means by which we distinguish what's correct or incorrect. No action, as I understand it, is intrinsically correct or incorrect, except as it is seen within the game, or as seen within a social context. No more than an arrow is intrinsically pointing, it points within the context of the actions associated with the arrow.
I do think there is a kind of temporal logic to it, i.e., there is an action, then there is the determination if that action is correct or incorrect. How does one separate the action from the act of distinguishing right and wrong, correct and incorrect? There would be no temporal logic if the act itself was intrinsically right or wrong, correct or incorrect. The acts are only deemed correct or incorrect as the social group determines. When I use the word determine, I'm saying that the social groups decisions to say the bishop moves diagonally is not determined by any move in itself, but is determined within the social context of distinguishing correct and incorrect moves.
As to your last point, I agree that the "it" in the characteristic signs of it refers to the distinguishing between mistakes and correct play. However, the acts of distinction cannot be separated from the objects of distinction. Don't they go hand-in-hand?
I'm not sure I've understood your points, because in the first paragraph you seem to suggest that it's the actions that are correct or incorrect. However, in the last paragraph you do distinguish between the act of distinguishing correct and incorrect, from the acts within the game. However, the acts within the game are what determine correct or incorrect, but only as we determine that they are correct or incorrect. The two seem to be logically connected.
I've repeated myself, but only in an effort to clarify. I've probably misunderstood your points.
Not that I disagree, but it's also worth noting that at §51, immediately before W counsels the reader to "look at what really happens in detail", he asks whether the signification of the colour by the sign consists in a mental correspondence between sign and colour, such that the colour always comes before our minds when using the sign. I think that what Wittgenstein is also doing here is continuing his sustained attack on the idea that meaning is mental (or spiritual or occult). At §52, he says that an empirical investigation is superfluous if one presupposes an explanation and disregards empirical facts, which strikes me (at least in part) as a criticism directed at those who presuppose the explanation just described, i.e. the mental account of correspondence/meaning.
Fair point.
Quoting Luke
It's an interesting take on it. I'd be inclined to agree insofar as I'm allowed to emphasise your use of the word 'also'.
My reading of 55 is roughly in accord with @StreetlightX so I won't repeat it, but I would like to add (or rather draw further attention to) the theme which StreetlightX hints at;
The three stage aphorism groups have thus far been of a similar sort and I think 55 belongs to the group expressed in 46-64 (so we haven't finished it yet) in which Wittgenstein is examining views about names signifying primary elements. So, Wittgenstein is making his usual attack on generalisation here. "isn't this the way things are?", the interlocutor asks, "Well, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't", Wittgenstein answers.
It's broadly speaking taking apart, piece by piece, any attempt to analyse names into something else, something 'hidden' behind their every day use.
I think that there is really no such difference between these two examples. The only real difference is that one is in the form of a question. "Is it the same length as Nothung" really has the same sort of meaning as "Does Nothung have a sharp blade", when Nothung has been destroyed. In each case, "sharp blade" and "length" refer to properties of an object which once existed but does not exist anymore. There may be a distinction of primary and secondary properties here, but I don't think that's what Wittgenstein intends. So talking about the properties of non-existent objects, whether it be "length", or "sharp blade", in each case has some sense, but he hasn't really examined in what kind of way it has sense.
Quoting Sam26
This would require the assumption that the game, or "social context" has inherent within it, rules, by the means of which, such a judgement of correct or incorrect could be made. But we have not yet found, in the close-up examination of the details, the existence of any such rules. We haven't even gotten beyond the problem which is that philosophers are commonly opposed to making such a close-up examination. Why do you simply assume that there are rules inherent within "social context"?
I pretty much agree on all these points - it is only within the context of a game that one can speak of correct and incorrect actions, and that those actions themselves are not 'intrinsically' correct or incorrect. But we can argue this and still say that it is actions that are themselves correct or not with the qualification, that correctness must be understood within the context of a game. In fact, to be perfectly frank, it should be the case that such a qualification isn't even necessary - for if Witty is right, it wouldn't even make sense to speak of correctness outside of a game. It's in that sense that I'm happy to say that actions can or cannot be correct. Long story short - we agree, with a small difference on terminological emphasis.
Quoting Sam26
Not necessarily. Recall that the context of all this is in a discussion about the variety of roles that rules can have in a language-game. And this part in particular is about reading rules 'off the way the game is played' - that is, reading rules off behaviour. And Witty's point here seems to me to be something like: one can recognise that rules are at work, even if one is ignorant of the 'content' of those rules: "It would be possible to recognise that someone was doing so [correcting a slip of the tongue] even without knowing his language." Presumably, without knowing the language - without knowing what mistake was made - one can still recognise that a mistake was made. But this is a minor point.
I don't understand how it is that you do not agree with this, namely, that any language-game, which by definition is social, necessarily has rules (implicit and/or explicit). The rules are observed in the actions of those who participate, either correctly or incorrectly. So, if the call is made for a slab, and someone brings the correct stone, they, by definition, are following the correct rule. What is the rule? The rule (known or unknown) is in the bringing of the correct stone in response to the call. If there is no rule, how can we say that they followed the correct action? Keep in mind that even if there is no concept of a rule, as in primitive man, the act of retrieving the correct stone is the act by which we can attribute the concept rule as we know it.
Any language-game by definition is a rule-following activity, if not, then there would be no consistency of actions that would make it work. If there were no rules there would be no agreement in how to proceed, and thus no game of any sort, language or not. What is the rule that dictates that I should go left or right when I see an arrow? There surely isn't something intrinsic to the arrow. It has to be consistency of action within the group as they respond in various contexts to the pointing of the arrow, and that's what the rule consists in, necessarily.
I'm not assuming anything, I'm basing my conclusion on the evidence, as just presented in the previous paragraphs, and as presented by others as they too have interpreted these ideas. I'm not just pulling this out of the air randomly.
Afterthought:
This is not connected to my response to MU.
Kripke's paradox, by the way, is dependent on an interpretation of a rule, which is not what correct rule-following is about (not something in me, as if my understanding determines what's correct or not). It's not my interpretation of some rule that determines what it means to follow a rule correctly, it's in the agreement of the acts within the social group that determines what's correct or not.
I think Kripke has gone wrong in attributing one's interpretation of the rule with correct rule-following. So, the answer to Kripke's paradox is in the dissolving of the problem, which is done when one see's correct rule-following in the right light.
I may be misunderstanding what you're saying here, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems this (and similar objections you've raised) are of the form;
"Presume that some hidden generalisable rule hides behind what we see in these examples - Wittgenstein has failed to establish what it is"
Whereas what Wittgenstein is showing by these examples is that there is no generalisable rule hidden behind what we see.
So in essence you're right, from your premise. Wittgenstein has failed to show us the generalisable rule behind what we see in the examples, but that's because his examples are meant to show that there isn't one.
I question whether this is not more of a rule than an exception. Firstly, note that Wittgenstein is specifically discussing names at §55 and not simply words. Thus, are there any examples of names which are used without the involvement of a sample or paradigm, i.e. without a standard of comparison?
Quoting StreetlightX
I find it interesting that Wittgenstein chooses an example here that is most likely fictional. Even if it is not, there are certainly other meaningful names in our language which are more clearly fictional. We needn't say that these names of fiction lack samples, because the public works of fiction which give meaning to these names can equally be used as independent standards of comparison to teach the meanings of the names and to help settle disputes.
We went through this at the beginning of the book. In Wittgenstein's use of "game" it is neither implicit nor explicit that rules are necessary for games. It may be the case, as StreetlightX suggests above, that "rules" implies "game", but "game" does not necessarily imply "rules". But I don't think that we've even progressed far enough in the close-up examination of rules to even be able to make this conclusion, that rules cannot exist outside the context of a game.
Quoting Sam26
Allow me to paraphrase the problem. If it requires that one knows a language in order for that person to learn a rule (I.e. if we can only learn a rule through language) then it is impossible that all language-games are rule following activities. At this point in the book, we haven't had the close-up examination required to determine the nature of "a rule", Therefore we cannot say whether it is the case that we must know rules in order to play a language-game, as you claim, or is it the case that we must be playing language-games in order to learn a rule.
Quoting Isaac
I think the issue is that a rule only seems to exist in a general form. Look at the three examples which StreetlightX very aptly laid out. What appears as if it were one rule, may manifest in these three different ways. So Wittgenstein asks, what does it mean to play a game according to a "particular rule". He wants to look beyond this general sort of form, to determine the form of the specific (particular) rule.
So what you call "the generalizable rule", is what is referred to as the "particular rule". His examples so far show three possible ways that the particular rule could exist. We haven't determined which one is the actual particular rule, so we haven't yet found the existence of the particular rule. However, I wouldn't say yet, that he intends to show that there isn't one, because we need to read further ahead.
Here's where you seem to go wrong. Where did anyone say this? Language would never get anywhere if this was the case. In fact, I've said the opposite, "[t]he rule (known or unknown) is in the bringing of the correct stone in response to the call." Moreover, what do you think learning a rule is all about? When one learns to act in accord with a command, one is learning to follow a rule. It doesn't require that you know a language, or that you know what a rule is. Animals can even participate in rule-governed activities. Think of learning to follow simple commands. The learning of language, and the learning of following rules are things that happen at the same time, viz., if you learn a language, then you are learning to follow rules (implicit or explicit, known or unknown).
Don't confuse the concept of rule-following (or the concept rule), which involves a certain understanding, with learning to follow a rule. The two are quite different. As the animal or primitive man, or even modern man learns to respond to a language, say commands, they are both learning a language and learning to follow rules (it's a simultaneous act). In fact, knowing is not involved at all, one simply acts in accord with, or acts along with others, and as one does, one learns. The learning gets more and more involved until the animal is left behind in its ability to learn or participate in more complicated linguistic forms. However, the human excels at using concepts, until the human learns what the concepts mean, and how to use the concepts in more sophisticated ways.
The only thing that is required beforehand, is that you have the ability to learn a language, whether primitive or not. It's not required that you know anything, in fact, you don't know anything. The language-game of knowing is much more advanced, and requires an advanced understanding of the use of the concepts involved.
I'm not yelling when I use the bold letters, I'm just using it as a very strong emphasis.
I'm afraid you've lost me, so this may be a bit piecemeal, I'm just trying to understand where you're coming from.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Are you saying that it seems to you that this is how a rule exists, or that you understand Wittgenstein to be implying this is the case? Because if the latter, I get the exact opposite impression and I'm not sure what line of interpretation has lead you to that conclusion.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't think it does appear as if it were one rule. Wittgenstein is pointing out three different roles rules can play in games. He's simply saying that rules do not play the same role in every game. This applies to any rule, it's not that one rule plays three different roles, it's that any rule could play any number of roles, there is no generalisable statement we could make about the roles rules play in games beyond a description of the roles rules play in games. That is what our close-to examination has shown.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, I'm unsure where you've got this impression from. If Wittgenstein was concerned to determine the form of the specific rule then he's going about doing so in a very obscure manner. He'd surely lay out as many language games as he could think of, and go through them one by one to arrive at some kind of Universal Rule Book. But we already have the first draft of such a book, the dictionary.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Wittgenstein is claiming that the generalisable rule doesn't exist, so I don't see how it could be what is referred to as the particular rule. You may have to explain this a bit more clearly for me.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
OK. I'm not sure, if you haven't got the message I'm getting from this section, that further reading is going to make it any more clear, but let's push on and see what happens.
True, but §40-45 is also largely about names, and I was not being specific when I said it was about 'words'. As for the question - sure - Nothing, N.N. - these are citied explicitly as names which have meaning even when their 'bearers' no longer exist.
Quoting Luke
Fiction works well to bear out Witty's point: names generally don't have to be names of existing things to have meaning. I'm not sure what it means to speak of a fictional name being a sample though - part of Witty's point in §55 is if the bearer of a name serves to be a sample or paradigm in a language game, then if that bearer doesn't exist ('is destroyed'), then that name 'would have no meaning'.
So you're saying that a person's name is an example of a name that is used without the involvement of a sample or paradigm?
What about Buddha or Genghis Khan or Hitler? I'm not doubting that these names have meaning - of course they do - but isn't there also some standard associated with using these names, whereby we can go wrong in their use, or which allows us to make true or false statements about their bearers? Do standards/paradigms only exist for things such as metres? Why can't the names of people or fictional objects also have standards/paradigms/samples/exemplars?
Quoting StreetlightX
I never said that a fictional name was a sample; I suggested that fictional names had samples/standards. E.g. if I wanted to find out details about Harry Potter then I could read one of the books. Likewise, if I wanted to find out information about Hitler, then I could read a history book.
No, only that it can be - if that's it role in a particular language game.
Quoting Luke
Again, the Wittgensteinian response, I think, would be: they can have samples/standards, but only if they are used that way. Just like I can say that the Paris meter is or is not a meter long if it's not playing the role of a standard, I can similarly speak of Harry Potter without invoking Rowling's specific Potter - I write Harry Potter fan fic, say.
It's all in the roles.
I know that you've said the exact opposite to this, that's the point. Wittgenstien, has not yet established the relationship between language and rules, to make the conclusion which you have made. So I suggested the very opposite to your conclusion, as still a possibility from what Wittgenstein has so far exposed. Whether a person needs to understand language to learn a rule, or whether a person needs to understand rules to learn a language has not yet been determined. So as much as you might assert that a person cannot learn language without learning rules, these assertions are irrelevant to the text we're reading.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, I am saying that this is what Wittgenstein is saying about rules. Look at #53 and the three ways which StreetlightX has elucidated. This is how "the rule" appears to us, as something general, vague and ill-defined, as "various possibilities". Here's the statement which concludes 53:
"If we call such a table the expression of a rule of the language-game, it can be said that what we call a rule of a language-game may have very different roles in the game."
The table is "the expression of a rule", so I interpret this as the table is the means of representing the rule. Remember back to 50, the object plays a role in the language-game, which is the means of representation of the name. Now the table is the means of representing a rule. in 50, what is represented by the object is "the name", in this case what is represented by the object (the table) is "a rule". Consider that we have switched "the name" for "the rule", such that the object, which is the table, is a means of representation of "the rule".
Now the name itself, is used to signify a type of object "slab" for example signifies a type of object. And, the rule itself, is used to signify a type of action. Both are signifying "a type", so in each case what is signified is something general, as types are. However, we can point to the name, as something particular, "slab" etc., now let's move along and point to the particular rule.
Quoting Isaac
It has to be one and the same rule which is referred to at 53. The rule dictates a correspondence between the sign and the square. But how the rule does this is what appears to us in the form of various possibilities. This is what stymies our attempts to isolate the particular rule. We see the chart and we see the action of the people following the rule, but if we go to describe how the rule acts, we can describe it in a variety of different ways, despite the fact that it is one and the same rule which may be acting in a variety of different ways. How can we isolate the particular rule when it appears to exist in a variety of different ways at the same time?
Quoting Isaac
But he makes a very succinct reference to playing games according to a "particular rule" at the beginning of 54. Yes, he is approaching the idea of a particular rule in a very obscure way, but that is because this is the way that the rules of language-games appear to us, in very obscure ways. The problem I see is that people like Sam26 simply assume that rules exist, they conclude that must exist in order for language to be successful, so they assume "rules" in some extremely general way as inherent within the social fabric. But Wittgenstein is saying at 52, that we must get over this biased, or prejudiced way of looking at this subject, and look right up close, in detail, and find these rules, and describe them, instead of just assuming that they must be there.
It's like assuming that the mouse came into existence from spontaneous generation. "Spontaneous generation out of grey rags and dust" is the bias, like "laws intrinsic within social fabric" is the bias. Now we need to look right up close, analyzing the details of that fabric, to find these rules. But there's an opposition to this up close, detailed analysis. Why? You seem to say that there is no such thing as the particular rule, while Sam26 seems to say that particular rules are necessary. Sam26 is saying that spontaneous generation is the necessary conclusion, while you are saying that there is no such thing.
Quoting Isaac
I suppose I do not know what you mean by 'generalizable rule". So I don't know what you mean when you say that Wittgenstein is claiming that the generalisable rule does not exist. I haven't yet seen him claim that any sort of rule does not exist.
If your only argument is that I'm going beyond what the text is saying at this point, I say, of course I am, and I've said as much.
You made the following statement, and I tried to answer it:
Quoting Sam26
So let me try again. I disagree with this because I am not sure as to whether an individual must know a language-game in order to learn a rule, or whether one must learn rules in order to play a language-game. Wittgenstein has not yet made clear this relationship between language-games and rules. And, if the former is true, then a language-game does not necessarily have rules because we would need to learn a language-game before we could learn any rules. So I hope this explains to you, and you now understand how it is that I do not agree with you that a language-game necessarily has rules.
You're talking about whether a name (or its bearer) can be a standard, whereas my question and your original statement were about whether a name requires a standard. The latter is what I take Wittgenstein to be referring to at the end of section 55. This is unrelated to a name's (or its bearer's) role in the language game.
But there is no problem here to resolve. The rule only appears vague when we are looking for something 'hidden' behind it. Absent of that, it is not vague and ill-defined at all. Do you have any great trouble speaking to people in ordinary language?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't understand this at all. The name "slab" (in a certain language game) refers to a type of object. The chart of relations in 48 shows which types of action (in response to which utterances) are considered by the players to be in accordance with the rules. Why would we now look for the exact action that is of the specified type? I'm not sure what that would have to do with the investigation here.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We can't. That's the point.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I'm not sure I'm doing anything more by repeating myself other than perhaps making my interpretation less clear, not more so.
Wittgenstein believes that philosophy has been misguided by our grammar. I cannot put it much more basically than to say that it has been misguided into thinking that because we can "say" something in one context, we can analyse it without context. His work here is trying to show the effect of context on the meaning of words. It is not trying to map those effects, or explain them, or find some unifying theory behind them.
I don't see the logic here. I have only a few problems speaking to people, but I don't see any rules here. I am not looking for something hidden behind the rules, I am looking for the rules themselves. But I see no rules, so I don't know what you're talking about. How could I be looking for something hidden behind the rules, when I do not even see any rules?
Quoting Isaac
The chart does not show this though, that's the point. The chart is just an arrangement of coloured squares. Along with the chart there are instructions as to how to use the symbols, "R", "G" "W" "B". It is the instructions, whether the actions are according to the instructions, which determines whether the actions are according to the rules. So I have to associate "the rule" with the instructions, not with the chart.
Likewise, when the person calls "slab", the instructions are for the apprentice to bring a certain type of stone. It is the instructions which constitute "the rule", not the word "slab". The word "slab" is a representation of the instructions, for the apprentice, and the instructions are the rule. The word "slab" is a representation of the rule, which is what the apprentice is supposed to do upon hearing the word. What the apprentice is supposed to do, may also be described, and this description is another representation of the rule, which may be issued as instructions.
Quoting Isaac
I don't believe this. I think this is exactly what Wittgenstein is looking for the "particular rule". That is why he says we have to look up close, in detail, and he asks about the different cases in which a game is said to be played according to a particular rule. You might say that we cannot determine a particular rule, but that's not what Wittgenstein is saying. Consider, that the mouse comes out of the rags. Someone says, it's spontaneous generation. That's just like you, saying above, that the rules are there, in language, they must be or else we couldn't communicate. So we take it for granted, that the rules just come out of language, like the mouse just comes out of the rag, spontaneous generation. Now Wittgenstein says let's look into this language thing in detail, and see if we can determine exactly how these rules are coming into existence, just like examining the rags up close to see where the mouse is coming from. First off, we need to get a very clear idea of what a rule is, so we know exactly what we are looking for in there.
Quoting Isaac
I think it is a mistaken reduction to say that what Wittgenstein is trying to show in this book, is one single thing. What he is showing changes almost as quickly as the numbers change, and that's why reading this is such a long arduous process.
He states that it must be possible to describe the state of affairs in which everything destructible is destroyed. He highlights the illicit presumption: "...this description will contain words; and what corresponds to these cannot then be destroyed, for otherwise the words would have no meaning." He repeats his earlier argument that the meaning of a person's name is not its bearer. He instructs the reader that what would be required for a name to lose its meaning is not the destruction of its signified object, but instead the destruction of the paradigm associated with the name's use.
As has been mentioned, Wittgenstein’s discussion should be viewed against the background of the Tractatus. The basic assumptions of the Tractatus is that there are simple objects and simple names that correspond to them. Underlying the relations between simple objects and simple names is a logical scaffolding that determines how they can be combined. In the PI he rejects each of these assumptions - simple objects, simple names, and the underlying logic of relations.
Instead of a transcendental, invariant logic that underlying both language and the world it pictures he is now investigating rules - rules of games and rules of language games. Rules do not exist independently of the game of which they are the rules. There are no rules for rules - that is, no rules that allow or disallow what can be a rule of a game, and no rules for how rules are to be followed. Games do not simply follow rules they can create rules as the game is being played. Language is not simply a rule following activity, it is also a rule making activity, an activity determined by the activities we are involved in.
Following on from his remarks at 55, using the example of a colour, he asks whether we could proceed without a paradigm/sample if instead we were to "bear in mind" the colour that a word represents. He suggests that such memories could provide us with the "indestructible" element sought at 55. However, the problem with this consideration is one which will famously return later:
Paragraph 58 I find very interesting. I'm interested in how some of you are going to interpret it.
Hi Sam
I'm not sure if I follow this. You say that "meaning...may not have any one property" corresponding to it, except in some cases such as a triangle. But you also say that a triangle's property of having three sides is only "part of" its meaning. You then go on to say that the concept of a triangle gets its meaning from its use anyway. So, I don't follow your point about meaning possibly having only one property.
Are you saying that you aren't able to respond when someone asks you to "fetch a red apple"? If not, then you know the rule to that language game to the extent that anyone else knows it (the extent to which it can be known). A rule is like a signpost. It is not meant to be exhaustive, it is only meant to be sufficient, that sufficiency being determined by use.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In this instance, yes. But not in every instance. That's the point of the example. No rule can exhaustively determine what do do next. Every rule requires interpretation at some level. So if we have a chart of colours with names to their right, how do we know to read off to the right? So we add some arrows. But how do we know to follow an arrow? So we add some instruction to that effect. But how do we know the meaning of the instruction?...
Eventually you have to arrive at simply what we have been instructed to understand by our existing within a social network, the near constant 'reverting to the mean' effect of each person trying to copy the other, which is what Sam has been trying to explain.
As to the subsequent general issue of what Wittgenstein is saying, I can only suggest reading the whole book, perhaps together with some of the Zettel. Or maybe, if you're not that into Wittgenstein, just the summaries of some of the academics who have already done so. I wouldn't read too much into what you think the metaphors could mean at this stage, afterall, being a metaphor, it could mean virtually anything when taken out of context.
We don't really start to see Wittgenstein exploring this until 60 (where we get into analyticity), but the concept, I think, will help with the understanding of the the preceeding aphorisms.
It's easy to say "if you respond when someone says 'fetch the apple' then you know the rule", but this claim needs to be justified. First, we would have to say that there is a correct response, one which is according to the rule, because simple response is insufficient to demonstrate the existence of a rule. Further, it does not suffice to simply assume that any given response is the "correct" response. The judgement that any response is correct requires consulting the rule. Therefore, to justify "then you know the rule" requires that there is a rule available for consultation. Where do we find this rule, for consultation?
Quoting Isaac
The problem is, that you here, just like Sam26, refer to some vague "social network", as if the rules are just supposed to magically appear within this context, like the mouse which jumps from the dusty rags. I'm looking in detail, as Wittgenstein suggests, trying to determine the "particular rule", to validate this claim that there are rules within this social network.
Quoting Luke
Do you have a suggestion of how we ought to reconcile the following statements of 56 and 57:
The statement of 56 seems clear, memory does not always have the final word in making such decisions. However, at 57 he seems to say that if we forget, then the meaning is gone. So in this sense, memory would be the "highest court" because it determines whether something has meaning or not. Also, it suggests that meaning is not indestructible as was earlier suggested, because when the memory is gone, so is the meaning.
If you fetch a red apple whenever you are asked to then you know the rule. It is as simple as that. Fetching the apple is sufficient. What more do you think needs to be added? What is missing? Whether or not one is following the rule is determined by an action:
“We could imagine that the language of §2 was the whole language of A and B; even the whole language of a tribe. The children are brought up to perform these actions, to use these words as they do so, and to react in this way to the words of others.” (§6)
The paradigm is the highest court.
"An example of something corresponding to the name, and without which it would have no meaning, is a paradigm that is used in connexion with the name in the language-game." (§55)
A physical example is in general a more reliable paradigm provided it does not change. In addition, we are able to compare the sample with the name. I do not need to consult a sample of the color red each time I fetch a red apple, but if you fetch a yellow apple and say that this is how you remember the color red, then we can consult the sample to settle the matter of what red means.
I may forget what red means, but there are still samples or examples that serve as the paradigm. The physical sample is not indestructible but more durable and reliable than a memory. It would only be the case that red had no meaning if there were no paradigm, either physical or mental, that connected the name to the color.
It's not "as simple as that" though. Right now if someone said "fetch a red apple", I would not be in the least bit inclined to go to the store and get a red apple. However, if there is a rule involved with this phrase, I must still know the rule because I understand the phrase. However, I chose not to act according to the assumed rule. So despite the fact that acting in a certain way may indicate that I know the rule, if there is such a rule, it's not a reliable way of indicating whether I know that rule. And so it doesn't suffice as a premise, whereby we could conclude the existence of such a rule, because in each and every particular case when someone says "fetch a red apple", people behave differently.
Quoting Fooloso4
As Wittgenstein demonstrates, there are problems with this imaginary scenario of yours.
Quoting Fooloso4
You seem to missing the fact that it is made explicitly clear by Wittgenstein at 55, that this so-called "paradigm" cannot be a physical object, because the name must be allowed to have meaning after the physical object is destroyed. What the name signifies must be indestructible, a physical example is not. Therefore a physical example is not what Wittgenstein refers to here as "a paradigm".
Following a rule does not mean that one must follow it, but rather that one knows how to follow it.
There may be cases where we cannot tell whether or not you know the rule, but if you consistently follow it that is a reliable way of indicating that you do know it.
In this case it is not a matter of whether or not there is such a rule. “Fetch a red apple” is the rule. Those who consistently fetch a red apple understand the rule and how to follow it. Why some don’t follow it requires further investigation into the particulars of that case to determine whether they choose not to follow it or if there are circumstantial reasons that prevent them from following it or if the cannot follow it because they do not understand what to do.
That was a direct quote from the text (§6). What problems are there?
The object serves as a paradigm. It is something that serves as an example of what red means. If someone does not know what red means I cannot tell them to remember what it means or to look in my memory. The particular object I point to can be destroyed but there are others that can serve as the paradigm.
What cannot be destroyed is what gives the words their meaning, it “is that without which they would have no meaning” (§55) A paradigm can be destroyed but then word would no longer mean anything . If you were the last remaining member of a tribe and everything owned by the tribe was destroyed a “rel” would mean something to you but not to anyone else. Since no “rels” exist there is nothing that can serve as a paradigm by which “rel” means anything for anyone else, and if you forget or die then it would no longer have any meaning. The paradigm would be destroyed.
Do you not recognize that as blatantly contradictory?
Quoting Fooloso4
How is that the rule? "Fetch a red apple" is the statement, what is said. If there is a corresponding rule, the rule would tell me what to do when I hear that statement. The rule cannot be the statement itself, because the rule must indicate what the correct action is when the statement is heard.
Quoting Fooloso4
You should read the thread from the beginning, we covered that already.
Quoting Fooloso4
Wittgenstein explicitly states that the name must have meaning even if everything is destroyed. So it is clear that he is not thinking about a multitude of objects acting as the paradigm.
Quoting Fooloso4
You are misrepresenting what Wittgenstein says at 55. He explicitly says that the name would have meaning even if all the corresponding objects were destroyed. Then he says "An example of something corresponding to the name, and without which it would have no meaning, is a paradigm that is used in connexion with the name in the language-game." So we can conclude that "a paradigm" does not refer to any object, or a multiplicity of objects.
.
No, that presumes that the definition of "rule" exists prior to our investigation and we are demonstrating that the thing we have identified belongs to that definition. That's not what's happening here. Wittgenstein is saying "let's call the paradigm that looks like it is needed to explain this broadly similar collection of behaviours a 'rule'", then look at some examples to see how it varies. You're starting from the premise that a 'rule' is a thing of universally fixed and agreed on definition and the game is to try and see if what Wittgenstein describes is such a thing. You may play that game with your definition of 'rule' but it's not a game I care to play.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, so I say that fetching an object I would call an apple of the colour I recall as red is the correct application of the rule here unless everyone around me told me that what I recall as red is actually the colour called blue, in which case I would be inclined to change my mind, otherwise my word 'red' is not going to do what I want it to do when spoken.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In different places depending on its role in the language game. It may be in the collective memory of the players, it might be an object, could be a rulebook, maybe a sample, several samples, a mathematical equation... could be anywhere.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How would you know when you find such a thing?
Two different senses in which one can follow a rule. The first means to understand what the rule is. You have indicated that you can follow the rule to fetch a red apple but choose not to. Do you follow?
It is grammatically in the imperative mood. It is an order or command or request. If you understand the grammar (the rule) you know it is telling you to fetch an apple. It is part of the language game of giving orders, and obeying them. (§23)
Well then you should know that it is not my “imaginary scenario”. Others pointed to the centrality of action, you disagreed.
Are you referring to the statement in §55 in quotes? If so, that is not Wittgenstein's position, it is one that is said that he rejects.
Once the connection between the name and the thing named is made the paradigm is no longer needed, but without the paradigm the connection cannot be made. If we read in an ancient text that someone took the “x” and threw it, the object named would have no meaning unless we knew what it was. If no “x” exists and nothing else is said about it then the name no longer has any meaning.
What is the paradigm of a horse or a cat or a table? Where do we find the paradigm?
Then what do you think it refers to? What are the examples that correspond to the name? What serves as a paradigm depends on that is being named. The paradigm of a rule will not be an object but the paradigm of a table will be.
I'm fine with this, but then it makes no sense to say, as you did, that if you are able to respond when someone asks you to "fetch a red apple" then you know the rule, because this also presumes a definition of "rule". You cannot exclude my definition of "rule" because it is presumptuous, and then proceed with your own presumed definition.
This is an important point demonstrated in Plato's Theaetetus, and it is evident that Wittgenstein is familiar with this work. The participants in the dialogue proceeded toward defining "knowledge". Each definition which they tried out, based on examples of how knowledge appeared to exist, proved to be faulty in their enquiry. So they failed. At the end, they realized that they had failed because they had a preconceived idea of knowledge, as excluding the possibility of falsity, or mistake, and this preconceived idea was wrong in comparison with how knowledge actually exists. So this presumption that knowledge had to exclude mistake or falsity prevented them from being able to say that any of the descriptions of knowledge, which they took from real examples, qualified as "knowledge" according to that preconceived notion. Knowledge in the existent examples didn't have the capacity to exclude the possibility of mistake or falsity.
So here we have a very similar issue. If we have a preconceived idea of what "following a rule" is, this will stymie our attempt to look at the real world instances and determine what "following a rule" really is. On this basis, I disagree that Wittgenstein is saying "let's call the paradigm that looks like it is needed to explain this broadly similar collection of behaviours a 'rule'", because this is to proceed with a preconceived idea as to what a rule is. What Wittgenstein did, in fact say at 53 is: "Let us recall the kinds of case where we say that a game is played according to a definite rule." Then he goes on at 54 to explain those kinds of cases.
Therefore he has not made the generalization which you claim. He has not claimed to call "this broadly similar collection of behaviours" is a "rule", he has only described a variety of different behaviours in which we say that a game is being played according to a rule.
Quoting Isaac
I think that this is a very good point, and it is the question which came to my mind after reading Plato's Theaetetus. If we proceed to define "knowledge" by looking for instances of knowledge, and then producing a definition of knowledge from that, how would we know in the first place which of the things we are looking at, are knowledge. How can we find what we are looking for, if we proceed with no idea of how to identify it. But this is the Platonic method, it's called Platonic dialectics, and it bears a strong resemblance to Wittgenstein's method. The method is to examine the sorts of things which are referred to by a particular word (usage of that word) and produce a definition of the word from the way it is used. We know which of the things we look at are the ones we are looking for by the use of the word. If the thing is called "knowledge", then it is an example of the thing we are seeking to define. So in the example of the Theaetetus, we would approach "knowledge" without any preconceived notions of what "knowledge" ought to refer to, then examine all sorts of instances where the word is used, and develop an understanding of what "knowledge" means from that. So we do have a means of identifying the thing which we are trying to define, and that is the usage of the word. I think Wittgenstein is saying we ought to approach "rule" in this way. And soon he will demonstrate the profound difficulties with Platonic dialectics when he asks what sort of thing is a "game", and mentions a vast variety of different things referred to by that word. Now he has mentioned a variety of different things referred to as "playing a game according to a particular rule".
Quoting Fooloso4
I follow, but clearly the point Wittgenstein is making at 54 is that there are different senses of "following a rule". On what basis would you choose one over the other as the correct sense?
Quoting Fooloso4
All I see is that it is stated, I do not see him rejecting it.
Quoting Fooloso4
I do not see where Wittgenstein makes this claim. In fact, if this were the case, then we'd have to rely on memory. But he explicitly rejects a reliance on memory at 56.
Quoting Fooloso4
Don't ask me, I didn't write the book, and as far as I can tell he hasn't elucidated this yet. Maybe he likes Platonic realism in which the example (paradigm) exists in some eternal Platonic realm, or maybe he'll put forth some other platform. I don't know.
That's fair enough, it's kind of what I meant by not wanting to play that game. I'm fairly happy with what I think Wittgenstein actually means by 'rule' (which in my case is a fairly standard interpretation) and whilst I wouldn't rule out the possibility of your convincing me otherwise, its just not as interesting to me as some of the aspects about which I think there's more uncertainty (even among scholars).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't disagree with this, I only mean to emphasise that Wittgenstein is not saying that 'rule' should mean something and then proceeding to see what meets this definition, but rather working the other way around.
I felt like your point was implying that some situation might exist where we say a game is being played according to a rule, but which, on investigation we find it is not (ie your comment about the assertion needing to be justified). I was trying to get across that Wittgenstein is simply accepting that whatever we say is being played according to a rule is part of the definition of 'rule' so he's not (at this stage) undertaking an analysis of whether people are right to say that a game is being played according to a rule.
I don't much disagree with your sketch of Wittgenstein's approach to definition, but this came out of your disagreement with the claim that the rules were somehow in 'the social context' and that a close examination did not reveal them to be. If you're accepting of Wittgenstein's approach to definition, then you're happy that what he's calling 'rules' are indeed rules. In that case, I'm hard pressed to see what is missing from the text by way of as strong an indication as possible that these 'rules' are indeed in the social context. It seems to me as if just about every example Wittgenstein has given thus far has indicated this conclusion.
So we're in good agreement here.
Quoting Isaac
This is where we may have a problem, and fall out of agreement. I really believe that there are difficulties with this method, Platonic dialectics, which Witty will expose with his discussion of what is a game. The same word will be used in a wide variety of ways with some sort of thread of relation. We, as human beings have an intuitive inclination to judge the "correct" way. But the method has no means of determining the correct way. According to the principles of this method, there is no such thing as the correct way, there is just a variety of different ways, somehow related, which all need to be examined. So the common notion of "a rule" turns out to be incompatible with this method. There is no rule as to what a game is. And even the word "rule" refers to many different things. This ought to leave us at a loss as to how to ground the idea of correct and incorrect, which is why Plato turned to "the good". Whatever form of grounding one chooses, it may appear to be an arbitrary choice. So we will likely fall out of agreement on this because I think that the method provides no principles for judging correct and incorrect .
§54 is about the different functions or ways in which a rule is used in a game. In each case there is no confusion as to what rule is to be followed.
There is a reason why it is in parentheses. The next paragraph begins -
“One might, of course, object at once …”
And concludes:
“An example of something corresponding to the name, and without which it would have no meaning, is a paradigm that is used in connexion with the name in the language-game."
The example serves as a paradigm for something that corresponds to the name.
If we are not in agreement that something is red we must rely on a paradigm that can be pointed to rather than what each of us remembers. If you do not know what “greige” is you can look it up and find that it does have a meaning, that it is a color, but since there are many colors greige is still meaningless unless you are shown a sample - from a paint color card or the color of the foyer, for example. They serve as a paradigm. The sample can be destroyed, the foyer can be destroyed, but there must be something that you can be shown that is used as a paradigm. “An example of something corresponding to the name …” (§55)
The one thing I can say about MU is that he keeps his cool about all of this. In that sense he is better than me. The Marine in me wants to take the person and kick them in the ass, which would solve nothing. I think it comes down to this, you either see it or you don't. If you don't see it, fine, just move on. Now, if I can take my own advice, I'd be doing well.
I have nothing against you MU, you may be the greatest guy in the world, I just don't have the patience with continually arguing or repeating myself over and over again. Luke seems to be able to do it. Luke has also been arguing some of these ideas for years.
What's interesting is that I'm going to be giving a class to some people on some of this material. I hope I can keep my cool. Just kidding, I'll be fine.
My point is that if you think you're going to get anywhere with your explanations you're living in a dream world. The only reason I see to answering some of his questions is to help others who may also be confused.
In some ways this is pretty funny, and frustrating, at least for me.
OK, I see that, but then he proceeds with "what if no such sample is a part of the language..." and proceeds from here. So it is still undetermined as to the criterion for "correct".
Quoting Sam26
I don't disagree with Wittgenstein on these points, but I disagree with your interpretation. So you have a specific interpretation, which may or may not, to some extent, be shared by other serious scholars. And so you might think that I disagree with Wittgenstein, simply because the interpretation I make, and which I agree with in principle, disagrees with yours.
Quoting Sam26
So why is it a case of "you must see it my way or else you don't see it at all"? It really does not come down to "I must see it your way, or else I don't see it". What makes your way the correct way?
Quoting Sam26
Hey Sam26, in case you haven't noticed, although I still have a lot of confusion, my perspective on this material has changed a lot since we first engaged years ago. Wouldn't that indicate that your explanations have helped me? Allow me to thank you for that. Thanks, sincerely. Now what about you? Do you steadfastly maintain the same interpretation you made on your first reading, or do you proceed with an open mind, hoping to learn something new every day?
One of the things I did MU was to read primary sources and make an interpretation based on what I understood the interpretation to be, then I compared that interpretation with other philosophers who knew the material. One of the ways I knew I was on track was that my interpretation was lining up with what others were saying. If my interpretation was not in line with what others were interpreting, at least generally, then I would have good reason to suspect that something was wrong. So it's not a matter of seeing it my way, or having an open mind, it's about understanding the material.
My first challenge to you would be to find other philosophers who see it the way you do, no interpretation is a matter one person's view, as if you can simply choose any interpretation you want. So why don't you find other philosophers who view rule-following the way you do, and present the argument.
One of the things you seem to have a hard time with, is that rule-following is intrinsic to the actions associated with linguistic activities. This is just basic stuff. It's fine if you disagree with it, but all I'm saying is that I don't follow your arguments. I've read your responses, and I can't make any sense of some of what your saying. It's not personal, it's just that I can't see how anything anyone can say will change your mind, or make you understand.
Whenever I'm arguing with someone in person, and I suspect that they're not understanding my argument, I'll ask them to explain my argument as they see it. In this way, I'll know that either I'm not explaining the argument well enough, or that they don't understand the argument.
My second challenge to you is to explain Wittgenstein's rule-following argument as you understand it, whether you disagree with it or not. Explain it like you were explaining it to someone who never read Wittgenstein, and use supporting paragraphs.
Right, if there were no sample that could be used as a paradigm then there is no way to settle whether one remembers the color correctly. It is possible that the sample has darkened but it is also possible that one does not remember the color correctly.
Such indeterminacy or uncertainty is not something Wittgenstein is attempting to overcome. See below regarding rules.
Indeed, language requires being able to follow the rules/logic/grammar of the language game. This is not something that is grasped all at once as a whole in a moment of insight. It often involves some form of correction and mimicry as the language game is learned. This applies to other rules as well. When, for example, one is learning the rules of chess, the pieces are identified and how they move is shown. When the player who is learning makes a move that violates the rules how the piece is allowed to move she is shown again. A more astute learner may learn simply by watching others play.
But not all games are played by rules that are set and clearly defined. Sometimes the rules are made as we go along by some kind of consent and agreement. There are no rules that stand as the rules for making rules. In addition, the existing rules may no longer be adequate when something new is learned, as in the case of quantum mechanics, where the Newtonian rules do not apply.
So far I am in complete agreement with StreetlightX's interpretation, and I seem to be in agreement with Isaac. I have been pretty much in agreement with Luke up until now, but this particular section we're on now appears to be difficult.
Quoting Sam26
You keep asserting this, but I've followed the text quite closely and Wittgenstein has yet to make such a claim. Whether this is what you or I believe is irrelevant, we are interpreting the text for what it says.
Quoting Sam26
At this point in the text, where we're at, Wittgenstein has not yet produced a "rule-following argument". It actually doesn't seem to be the type of book which proceeds by arguments, more like he makes various points through multiple examples. If you could point me to such an argument, I will offer an interpretation of the passage. Otherwise you might just follow the thread and when this so-called rule-following argument comes up I'm sure we will discuss it.
Quoting Fooloso4
OK, so I think we agree on that, but how would you interpret this passage at the end of 57:
Is he saying that what was referred to as a paradigm, in 55, "something corresponding to the name, and without which it would have no meaning", actually exists in memory? Or what does he mean by "comparable" with a paradigm? He seems to say at 55 that an object cannot be such a paradigm because the name can still have meaning without the object, but now he says that the name cannot have meaning without the memory. So isn't it the memory which fulfills the conditions of "a paradigm" as stated at 55, something corresponding to the name, without which the name would have no meaning?
If the paradigm is within the memory, and the memory is unreliable, then how could we ever know the correct use of the word?
I agree, and part of the problem with language and/or concepts, is that because there aren't always clearly defined rules, we have a tendency to limit the use of a word based on a particular context, and forget other contexts in which the word is also correctly used. We forget the family resemblances associated with being in a family, and focus on only brown eyes and large noses. It's as if when thinking about the concept game we're only focused on board games and ball games.
There are a couple of issues with this; firstly, why would you be so concerned that a method provide principles for strictly judging correct from incorrect? I mean, what's the goal here. Is it just so that we can enjoy policing language users who've 'got it wrong'? What use would we put such a rule to if we found one?
The second I think you might actually find in the text when Wittgenstein talks about accuracy. I may be wrong, but I think what you are looking for (what you think is missing) would be some solution to the problem Wittgenstein already posed when he investigated the claim that the table of correspondence for game 2 (or 48, for that matter) could only be read 'correctly' if one knew the convention to follow from left to right. If we want to 'define' this rule we'd have to draw arrows and say the rule was to follow the arrows. But then how do we know to start at the blunt end and proceed to the pointed end? We'll, we'd have to maybe have a video recording of someone doing just that and say that this is the rule for arrow following. But how do we know from watching an instructional video the we are supposed to perform the same actions as the man in the film?... And so on forever. Wittgenstein is showing that you cannot have what you're looking for. Following one rule requires another rule, and following that rule requires another beneath it. We cannot learn the name of an object until we know what sort of thing 'names' are, we cannot follow ostension until we know what ostension is trying to do, we cannot follow a chart until we know to follow from left to right, we cannot follow an arrow until we know to proceed from the blunt to the pointed end. If you want a description of rule-following, describe a person's every observation, every action, and every response of every person they ever interacted with since birth. That is the full description of their 'learning a rule'. And if you want a fully accurate and complete description of the actual rule itself, collate all of human behaviour since we came down from the trees and there you will have your description.
Which leads me to the third point. The reason why Wittgenstein writes the way he does is widely considered to be his solution to this very problem. He's trying to get us to see something which actually cannot be said, it can only be shown. He's not constructing a watertight argument in logic, because there is no such thing. He's pointing out things which should lead us to 'see' what he's trying to show. Rather like someone trying to point out the beauty of a sunset by gesture alone, it's not going to work unless you're looking where he's looking.
Isn't that what a "rule" is though, a principle for judging correct from incorrect? If we are here concerned with "rules", but as you suggest, we are not concerned with principles for judging correct from incorrect, what could we possibly be talking about?
Quoting Isaac
If the full description of "learning a rule" requires that one already knows a rule, and this produces an infinite regress, then obviously this description is faulty.
So what do you think we can conclude from this? If describing language use as a case of rule-following results in such an infinite regress of needing to know a rule in order to learn a rule, ought we not conclude that this is an inadequate description? Doesn't this demonstration prove to you, as it does to me, that it is impossible that language use is a simple case of rule-following?
Consider that we have to account for the creation of rules as well, and this will come up later. It is impossible that creating rules is a rule-following activity or else we have the infinite regress. So if his intent were to make the description of language as a rule-following activity, into a true description, then the rule-creating activity would have to be excluded, as not part of language. Remember #3, we can make a description appropriate by circumscribing the region.
[quote=Wittgenstein] 3. Augustine, we might say, does describe a system of communication; only not everything that we call language is this system. And one has to say this in many cases where the question arises "Is this an appropriate description or not?" The answer is: "Yes, it is appropriate, but only for this narrowly circumscribed region, not for the whole of what you were claiming to describe."[/quote]
Quoting Isaac
Yes, this is good, but it's also a big problem for interpretation. To "get it" is not necessarily to understand the particular words, but to see what's being pointing at, beyond the particular words, the bigger picture of meaning. So let's say it's like you say, similar to pointing to the beauty of a sunset. Someone points and says look at that isn't it beautiful. One person might see this or that colour in the sky, another something on the horizon, another a pattern in the clouds (interpretation of art is similar to this), but what the person is really pointing to is the whole scene, as beautiful. The beauty is in the whole scene, not in any particular part. I think meaning is like this, how we see the whole scene, not any specific part.
He starts the quoted phrase by saying: “When we forget which colour this is the name of …”. What is not remembered is what the color “greige” means, that is, what color it is. We might remember the color of the foyer but not remember that the color is called greige. So if someone asked you to paint the bedroom greige it would have no meaning. If someone asked you to paint the bedroom the color of the foyer is some house you lived in years ago that color might be the same color the person who asked you to paint the bedroom means, but that might not be the color they had in mind.
It is the situation that is comparable. Suppose the person who wanted you to paint the room found a color swatch and wanted the room painted that color, but could not find the swatch to show you. The paradigm, in this case the swatch, is lost. It would be meaningless to ask that the room be painted the color of the swatch if there is no swatch.
This does not mean that the object cannot be a paradigm but that a paradigm is not necessary when the connection between the name and the thing named has been made. When the name would have no meaning for someone without an example, a paradigm is used, an example. That example might be an object, but if one already knows that this thing is called “xyz” then “xyz” still has meaning even without the presence of an object.
If the paradigm is within the memory, and the memory is unreliable, then how could we ever know the correct use of the word?
In general, the meaning of a word is determined by its use:
“For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word "meaning" it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” (§43)
If there were no physical paradigm then the correct use of a particular word might be in dispute. In some cases a dictionary could be consulted or examples of the use of the word in literature, but such cases are rare.
No, "we forget which colour this is the name of" says that we forget the colour, not that we forget the name.
Quoting Fooloso4
Not necessarily, because you might still remember that "greige" refers to a colour, but just not remember what colour it is. In this case, the loss of meaning of "greige" would not be complete, or absolute. The word would still have some meaning, it is understood to refer to a colour.
Quoting Fooloso4
OK, but notice that when the colour swatch is lost, the name of the colour still has some meaning. The person recognizes the name as being the name of a colour, but just doesn't have any way of knowing exactly what colour it is.
Quoting Fooloso4
I think that what is demonstrated is that the meaning of the name is not rooted in the paradigm (as physical example) at all. A paradigm is not necessary for the word to have meaning. The person forgets what colour "greige" refers to, but the name still has meaning as signifying "a colour". The colour swatch is lost, and the name still has meaning as signifying "a colour". The existence of a paradigm (physical or remembered example) is not necessary for a name to have meaning.
Quoting Fooloso4
Right, the meaning of a word is determined by its use. Is this something distinct from "a paradigm"? If so, then this would mean that the idea that the meaning of a word is determined by a paradigm can't be right. But we can create compatibility if the paradigm is somehow a paradigm of use.
The name is, in the example I used, “greige”. If you forget which color greige is the name of you do not necessarily forget the color. You may remember the color of the foyer but not remember or know that the name of the color is “greige”.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So, if someone asked you to paint the room greige and you just grabbed a can of paint and painted the room whatever color that happened to be do you think they would be satisfied because, after all, it is a color? If you don’t know what color to paint then the name greige is meaningless. Perhaps not in an absolute sense, you may already know that greige is a color or figure it out because every paint is some color, but meaningless in the sense that you do not know what to do with it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I did not say that the name was known only that there was a swatch.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That is true. The issue is making the connection between the name and the thing named. A paradigm is a way of doing that. If you cannot make the connection the name is meaningless. Knowing that it is a color is meaningless for the purpose of painting or picking out a fabric or whatever else you might do with a specific color if you don’t know what color it is.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A paradigm may be an example of how the word is used. This is what we find in dictionaries. In general we do not need paradigms for the words we commonly use. If we are unfamiliar with the word, however, a paradigm will help us make the connection.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The paradigm is an example of what it is that corresponds to the name (§55).
All I can do is repeat. If you do not know which colour "greige" refers to, but you know that it refers to a colour, then the name is not meaningless to you.
Quoting Fooloso4
But it doesn't make sense to say that if a word is useless for some particular purpose it is therefore meaningless. There are many, many, words which are useless for the purpose of picking out a paint or a fabric, but this does not make them meaningless. You are simply declaring that if the person cannot carry out a very specific task related to the word "greige", get a greige coloured paint, then the word "greige" is meaningless to that person. When in reality the word does have meaning to that person because the person knows that it refers to a colour. There is probably hundreds of colour names. The vast majority of them I am incapable of picking out the corresponding colour. However, I would recognize very many of them as colour names. It's nonsense to suggest that just because I cannot identify the corresponding colour, the name is therefore meaningless to me.
If you do not know what greige is then saying "the color greige" tells you that it is a color. In this case greige tells you nothing at all, it is the word color that tells you everything you know about greige. If you were not told that greige is a color merely saying "greige" is meaningless.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, if you did not know that greige was a color then greige would be meaningless.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is only when the word "color" is added to greige that you know it is a color. If you did not know what greige was and I said paint the walls greige you might assume that was the color but you might assume it was some kind of technique.
I am going to hold off commenting further until the discuss moves forward.
Context is key. At 56 he states that memories can be unreliable, however a (e.g. colour) sample can be used as the criterion of correctness (e.g. to help resolve disputes).
57 opens with the suggestion that "the meaning of the word 'red' is independent of the existence of a red thing," and so suggests a scenario which does not require samples. If we have no samples to rely upon and if we also forget what colour the name refers to, "the situation then is comparable with that in which we have lost a paradigm which was an instrument of our language".
Not an infinite regress, no. I'm pretty old, but even my birth was not an infinite amount of time ago. The true and full account of why it is raining right now would require an atom by atom description from the beginning of the universe. Not infinite, but impractically long. None of that prevents me from providing (and making good use of) the explanation "rising water vapour has condensed to a point where it is no longer suspended in the air". We can even predict quite accurately whether it is going to rain tomorrow, not because we know the position of every atom, but because we have a vague theory which works to an acceptable level of accuracy.
It's not that "learning a rule requires that one already know a rule" it's that all the rules Wittgenstein is interested in here, are of that sort. The description of our first acquisition of rules, our first tentative steps, is a matter of of child psychology, not philosophy of language. It is sufficient for this investigation, that Wittgenstein's "close examination" has shown no 'rule of rules', his examples have pointed fairly conclusively to the rule-following being situated firmly (and complexly) within the social context. Somewhere in the millions of interactions emerges the rule, just like somehow in the millions of interactions between air molecules emerges the weather patterns.
I don't see how you can deny an infinite regress. If your description of "learning a rule" includes that the person already knows a rule, then unless you can account for this already known rule in terms other than as "a rule", infinite regress is implied, and it is false to say that the description is "complete".
Quoting Isaac
So what you are saying here is that Wittgenstein is not describing what "learning a rule" is. He is describing what learning a particular sort of rule is. Maybe we could say that he is describing learning the sort of rules which apply to games. And, to learn this sort of rule requires that one already knows another sort of rule. This is good, but if he later attempts to define "rule" such that all rules are of the sort he is describing (circumscribe the region as per #3), then this other sort, the sort which is a prerequisite to the sort he is describing, needs to be accounted for in terms other than as a "rules", or else the definition is faulty as per #3.
Quoting Isaac
Right, from somewhere within those dusty rags, the mouse "emerges". Tell me another one bro. Isn't the "close examination" intended to get beyond this sort of thinking?
He proposes that "red exists" is meaningless. This is because that usage makes it appear like there is a thing named as "red", which exists. In reality there is no such thing (as demonstrated 55-57). So there is just the use of the word "red". That there is no such thing as that which is named by "red" is apparent from the above: it is not represented by the physical sample, nor is it represented by the memory. So "red exists" is just a misleading way of saying that the word "red" has a meaning. And "meaning" is a representation of the use of the word in language.
At the end of 58 he discloses a slight problem with this approach. He admits that "red exists" doesn't really say "the word red has meaning", but this is what it would have to say if it meant anything. What it really says, (according to how it is used), is that there is something named "red", which exists. However Wittgenstein has demonstrated that this is meaningless because there is no such thing as the thing which is called "red". And so he concludes that if "red exists" is to mean anything, it must mean that the word red has meaning.
You can see how it "contradicts itself in the attempt". The way "red exists" is used, is to signify that there is something called "red", which exists. But, there is no such thing as what is referred to by "red", only the meaning or use of "red". I believe it's a sort of paradox, and we might say that using the word "red" in this way creates the illusion that there is something named by "red", and, since meaning is use, the thing referred to, in this usage, must be in some way real because that's the meaning the usage has given it. So Witty's prior demonstration (55-57) indicates that there cannot be anything referred to by the word "red". However, the word is used as if there is such a thing. And, since meaning is use, the meaning is that there is such a thing. But to say that there is such a thing is to say something meaningless.
If the meaning of a word is not tied to an object, paradigm, sample, memory, or any other object (mental or otherwise), then it seems to follow that the meaning of "X exists," is derived in another way. In particular, meaning is derived how it is used in social contexts. So, "X exists," if it is to mean anything, means, there is such-and-such a use for the word. Although as Wittgenstein points out this is senseless.
We could extend this to the proposition that "God exists," which does not derive meaning from whether or not the thing associated with the concept has an instance in reality, but how we use the concept in a variety of social contexts. We should not think that a name is only meant to be some element of reality (PI 59).
This is not to say that the object has no place in the conversation, only that, when it comes to meaning, we need to separate meaning from the aforementioned objects. In saying that "Red exists," it appears "...to us as if we were saying something about the nature of red..." This causes us to look for some thing to associate with the color, which can cause confusion about meaning.
I think there is much more to what Wittgenstein is saying than what we are capturing in our comments.
This seems pretty obvious, so why the convoluted prelude about some unidentified speaker wanting to restrict the term 'name’ to what cannot occur in the combination 'X exists'? Why not? What is the problem? It seems to have to do with ‘names’ rather than any particular thing that is names such as red:
"A name signifies only what is an element of reality. What cannot be destroyed; what remains the same in all changes." (§59)
The two assumptions are connected - the elements of reality are not things that exist they are the elements that are the basis of what exists. This is a reference to the Tractatus’ view of analysis, the simple objects and names out of which the facts of the world and propositions are constructed. But this “particular picture” is now rejected. It is based on seeing the component parts of something composite, he uses the example of a chair, remaining unchanged when the chair is destroyed. Red is just such a component.
To believe that red must exist despite being unable to say that red exists (per the opening statement), one may be tempted to the metaphysical statement that red exists 'in its own right', or that red is 'timeless' or 'indestructible'.
Wittgenstein states that we want to take "Red exists" as "'Red' has a meaning", and "Red does not exist" as "'Red' has no meaning". However, this is not what those bewitched by the metaphysical picture are really trying to say when they say "Red exists", "but that this is what it would have to be saying if it meant anything." Those in the grip of the metaphysical picture appear to be contradicting themselves by saying "Red does not exist"; but the contradiction is really just a confusion regarding the grammatical and empirical propositions.
How do you relate #59 in this way? It appears to me like "meaning is use" has met the paradox of 58. We want to say "red exists" means that the word red has meaning, rather than that there is an existing thing called "red". However, since meaning is use, and we use "red exists" to say that there is something, a colour called "red", we cannot do what we want to do, the attempt contradicts itself. So it appears to me, like he has met this dead end, this paradox at 58, so he goes all the way back to the proposition "A name signifies only what is an element of reality" at 59, to get a fresh start, from a new perspective.
Quoting Luke
The problem is that meaning is use . And, we use "red" in this way, as if the word refers to a thing, "red exists", "red is a colour", etc.. So if we claim "red exists" doesn't really say anything about a thing named red, it only says something about how we use the word, then we must look to the use of the word for its meaning and we find that we use the word as if there is something called "red" which exists, So that's what "red exists" actually means. This is why "what we really want is simply to take "Red exists" as the statement: the word 'red' has a meaning", ends up contradicting itself in the attempt.
He seems to propose, at the end of 58, that what "red exists" really means is that there is something existing which has the color red. And when he suggests "what has that colour" is not a physical object, he must be referring back to the "mind's eye", or memory, at 57.
However, I would say that it's doubtful that he has proved at 55-57 that for "red" to have meaning requires that there is something which has that colour. It appears to me that the word "red" could still have meaning when there is no red physical object, nor such a colour in anyone's mind, as this is the case when we create imaginary scenarios. So one might say "red is a colour", while there is no red physical object, nor the image of a red colour in any mind, and "red" would have meaning in this imaginary scenario. This is demonstrated by Fooloso4's example, "greige" is a colour. In this case "greige" has meaning, as a colour, and there is nothing, in the physical, nor the mind, which has that coulour. The word "greige" receives its meaning from the context of use, "is a colour"
.
"A name signifies only what is an element of reality [the interlocutor, or his former self] (PI 59)," is not him going back because he is at some "dead end." He is continuing with his analysis of the idea that a name signifies some thing in reality. Just like you said, the name red, in terms of meaning, is not bound to some object for the reasons his already given in various analogies and examples. Much of 59 is connected with his view of objects and names in the Tractatus. As if some deep analysis of the names and objects will reveal the nature of the logic behind the connection, those things that are the simples. In other words, that one-to-one correspondence between the name in the proposition, and the object, which is the simplest part of a fact in the world. He concludes with, "These are the materials from which we construct that picture of reality." "Picture of reality..." is also pointing back to the Tractatus, viz., the picture theory.
Much of this is an argument against his former view, his early philosophy as seen in the Tractatus. I'm not exactly sure what it was that I said that was confusing or unclear, so I tried to give you some insight in to my thinking as I read this paragraph.
The issue is both linguistic and ontological. Names are the linguistic elements out of which descriptions are constructed. Names also label ontological elements. What can be said is said via the connection of linguistic elements, names. What exists exists via the connections between ontological elements, the building blocks of existence.
Wittgenstein rejects this kind of elemental analysis into simples and composites.
The restriction in §58 of the combination ‘X exists’ is based on the above assumptions. It amounts to saying that a name, the element out of which statements are made is a statement. §59 is the other half of the problem. If a name signifies an element of reality, it would mean that an element, that out of which what reality or what exists is constructed is real or exists.
The seeming paradox disappears when the elemental analysis into simples and composites is rejected.
However, he has just gone through this big discussion concerning rules of correspondence. This came out of the idea that a name signifies an element of reality. There needed to be a rule of correspondence. And this issue has remained unresolved because the paradigm could not be located.. So now he has to go all the way back, to where he was prior to this discussion of rules, to revisit the idea that a name signifies an element of reality, because no rules of correspondence could be validated.
Quoting Fooloso4
I don't see how you can say that. The problem, and apparent paradox, is with the supposition "meaning is use". We use the name "red" as if there is something, an element of reality or something like that, which is named as "red". Unless we reject "meaning is use", we cannot reject the "elemental analysis" unless we find some other thing, something other than an element of reality, which "red" refers to.
I don’t see that as paradoxical. As I understand it, what he is rejecting is the idea of “an element of reality”. Red refers to a color, that is how we use the name. We do not need the metaphysical framework of elements and complexes to use the word ‘red’ to name something that is red.
His use of the term 'element' should not be confused with the atomic elements in the periodic table.
I don't see that rejection yet. What I see is that he suggested this idea, that names represent elements of reality, way back in the 40"s. In describing this he saw the need for rules of correspondence. Such rules required a paradigm. The paradigm could not be located so now he's gone back to questioning the idea that names represent elements of reality.
Quoting Fooloso4
You are just obscuring the problem with this statement. We do not use "red" to name something that is red, we use it to name the colour of that thing. Red is a colour. So we use "red" to refer to a thing, and this thing is a colour. Now we have the metaphysical problem of accounting for the existence of this thing, because the use of "red" implies that there is such a thing, a colour, which is named "red". What we "want" to do here, according to Wittgenstein is just to say that it's a a function of how we use "red" and doing this might avoid the metaphysics. However, the problem is that meaning is use, so if that's how we use "red", that's what "red" means, that there's a thing, a colour called "red". So the attempt to do what we want to do, contradicts itself. The contradiction is put aside by saying "red exists" means that there is something somewhere which is coloured red. But this just brings us back to the problem of the paradigm.
What I said was that Quoting Fooloso4
It is not the thing that is red that is named red, a wagon or a barn, for example, but red names the color of the wagon or barn. If I was asked to show someone something that is red I could show them the wagon or the barn. If they understand the language game they know I referring to the color of the wagon or the barn and not to the wagon or barn itself.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
§58 brings into question the idea that there is a metaphysical problem:
We no more have to account for red than for anything and everything else. Why would 'red' be a metaphysical problem and not the existence of wagons and barns and the kid in the wagon and the cow in the barn?
---
§56
In §55, Witty examined two roles that names could play in a language-game. One in which the name was associated with a paradigm, one in which it was not. §56 adds a third role to this small list: one in which a name is still associated with a paradigm, but instead of the paradigm being something that really exists in the world 'out there', is instead associated with a 'memory-image' that exists 'in the mind'.
That said, despite the distinction between the paradigm 'out there' and the paradigm 'in here', §56 actually spends the majority of its discussion pointing out the similarities between the two types of uses names: the paradigm 'out there' can fade; the paradigm 'in here' can be forgotten.
The question then is this: why does Witty attempt to establish this equivalence between the two 'kinds' of use of paradigms ('out there' in the world and 'in here' here in the mind)? I say that this is a 'question', because at this point, Witty only hints at his motivation for drawing such an equivalence: he's beginning his attempt to undermine any necessary role of 'memory-images' in the use of a name. Hence:
§56: "This shows that we do not always resort to what memory tells us as the verdict of the highest court of appeal".
Pathing back a little, Witty reaches this conclusion by showing the interchangeability of both kinds of paradigms: if a (real-life) sample fades, we might appeal to memory to establish the (correct) use of a name. But the reverse is the case too: memory can also fade, and in this case, one might appeal instead to a (real-life) sample. Thus the conclusion reached so far is largely a negative one: the memory-image ain't all that.
§57 deepens the equivalence between paradigms 'in here' and paradigms 'out there' that was introduced in §56. Recall that in §55, Witty noted that if a paradigm is used in conjunction with a name, then that paradigm must exist, otherwise the name would have no meaning. §57 establishes the same consequences for cases in which the 'memory-image' is forgotten:
§57: "If we forget which colour this is the name of, the name loses its meaning for us; that is, we’re no longer able to play a particular language-game with it. And then the situation is comparable to that in which we’ve lost a paradigm which was an instrument of our language."
This actually helps answer a particular question that might crop up in the minds of some readers (it cropped up in mine!): if §55 established that names employed in conjunction with paradigms needed to correspond to something in reality order to have meaning, and if, in turn, §56 established an equivalence between those kinds of names and memory-images, then how could we speak of paradigms ('inside' or 'outside') fading/being forgotten? Isn't the point that they are necessary for the language-game to work? But this is precisely the point: they are necessary, without which the language-game which employs the name in the capacity of a paradigm would not be intelligible.
To speak modally, one could say that Witty argues for the contingency of a necessity: if a name is employed in its capacity of standing for a paradigm, then it is necessary that such a paradigm exist ('out there' or 'in the mind'), in order for the language-game to work. Otherwise, the language-game won't work. This 'injection' of contingency (if I can call it that), further helps undermine the necessity of the 'memory-image' in explaning the use of names:
§57: "And don’t cling to the idea of our always being able to bring red before our mind’s eye even when there is nothing red any more! That is just as if you were to say that there would still always be a chemical reaction producing a red flame".
Or, in terms I used previously, we can only speak of inside and outside (in the mind/out there in the world) and names in certain, specific contexts, and not others (when 'names' are used in certain roles and not others). And further, even when those roles are employed, nothing about language 'in itself' necessitates the use of those roles for names: necessity is instead drawn from the 'forms-of-life' which govern language-games.
I see the point a bit differently. Yes, the paradigm is necessary for such a language-game to work, but only because he has stipulated this by means of the example. It is a presupposition. We have presupposed that there is a language-game which requires rules of correspondence. This language game requires a paradigm.
We can say, that in order for there to be this type of language-game, the game of correspondence, which requires a paradigm, there must actually be a paradigm. However, his demonstrations show that no such paradigms really exist. Therefore we can conclude that there are no such language-games. I believe he is completely rejecting this type of correspondence. I see it as an "ideal correspondence", and correspondence itself has been reduced to being dependent on an ideal. In a few pages from here he will start to discuss the need to reject the inclination to seek such "ideals" in the effort to validate the rules of language-games. So he is here rejecting correspondence because of this "ideal" nature, it cannot be validated as a real language-game.
A color sample is a means of representation (§50). It is a bearer of the name. It shows the meaning of the name. (§40) It serves as a paradigm. (§55)
Can a memory serve as a paradigm? There is an obvious sense in which it can’t. If someone does not know what ‘red’ means I cannot show them by pointing to something in my memory. It is also obvious that if I don’t know or can’t remember what ‘red’ means I cannot show myself by pointing to something in my memory. If, however, I know what ‘red’ means I do not need a paradigm.
I think this is the direction you are going in when you say:
Quoting StreetlightX
Quoting StreetlightX
I think this is backwards. A name does not stand for a paradigm, a paradigm stands for, shows the meaning of, a name.
I agree, and this is very important in so many areas of our thinking. It has particular importance in our understanding of epistemology.
I'm using 'stand for' in place of, or as synonymous with, Witty's remark about words 'signifying'. Nothing special going on here.
§56: "But what if no such sample is part of the language, and we bear in mind the colour (for instance) that a word signifies?".
Similarly, when I speak of a memory-image serving as a paradigm, one should read this as 'in the role of a paradigm', where, moreover, I use 'paradigm' interchangeably with 'sample'. Especially since I read §56 as insisting on the similarity/equivalence of role that the memory-image and a 'real life' sample/paradigm play in the kind of language-game under discussion.
You're right to point this out. The paradigm is the color or the yard stick that the name refers to.
"It is only in a language that I can mean something by something."
Anyway, not a point I really want to follow through on, but this is the second time in this thread where 'things' have been said to stand for words, and it bothers me.
Is this possible? Can there be a name of a color for which no sample exists? How can we know what color is being named without a sample that is part of our language?
Quoting StreetlightX
My point is that there is no equivalence between a paradigm and a memory image. The memory image is dependent on something that was seen in the world, something that is remembered. Paradigms must be public, shared.
Quoting StreetlightX
The sample is a bearer of the name. When used as a paradigm it shows what the name, in this case, ‘red’ means. The name 'red' does not stand for the paradigm, the paradigm is merely an example of the name. The name 'red' stands for or represents whatever is that color.
Quoting StreetlightX
You are right, I cannot derive the name by staring at the sample. If, however, I refer to “bluorange” I can show you what the name blueorange means by pointing to the sample. The sample shows what the name means. The name is a label. The sample shows what it is a label for.
Quoting StreetlightX
Eliminate all samples, all paradigms or examples, and our use of language cannot show what ‘red’ or ‘bluorange’ means.
Is this possible? Can there be a name of a color for which no sample exists? How can we know what color is being named without a sample that is part of our language?
Quoting StreetlightX
My point is that there is no equivalence between a paradigm and a memory image. The memory image is dependent on something that was seen in the world. Paradigms must be public, shared.
Quoting StreetlightX
It is not that things stand for words but that the thing is the bearer of the name. When used as a paradigm, an example or sample, it shows what the name, in this case, ‘red’ means.
Quoting StreetlightX
You are right, I cannot derive the name 'red' by by staring at the sample. If, however, I say “bluorange” I can show you what the name blueorange means by pointing to the sample. The sample shows what the name means. The name is a label. The sample shows what it labels.
Quoting StreetlightX
W. is discussing both the function of a paradigm in language and what can serve in that function. What can serve in that function is often an actual object or thing. It is important to see why a memory-image cannot serve in that role.
(1) In §56, samples and memory-images both function to undergird a certain type of language-game, and the similarity Witty draws there is that both can 'fade', and that this fading has the same consequences for the kind of language-game under discussion. Just under half the discussion there is devoted to drawing out this similarity:
§56: "If we use a sample instead of our memory, there are circumstances in which we might say that the sample has changed colour, and we judge whether this is so by memory. But can’t we sometimes speak of a darkening (for example) of our memory-image? Aren’t we as much at the mercy of memory as of a sample? (For someone might feel like saying: “If we| had no memory, we would be at the mercy of a sample.”) - Or perhaps of some chemical reaction.""
(2) In §57, the comparison is even more straightforward, insofar as Witty spells out in so many words that the forgetting the color is "comparable to that in which we’ve lost a paradigm which was an instrument of our language" - this being the conclusion and thus the major lesson of §57.
If you think I simply shouldn't be calling a memory-image a paradigm, then fine, but that's a rather trivial terminological quibble that is altogether quite thin compared to the quite heavy thrust placed on making comparisons and similarities between the two that are operative all throughout §56 and §57. And this to say nothing about the questions of modality that I addressed in my previous posts on these.
Why should this bother you? It's how Wittgenstein himself describes a paradigm at #50
Notice that the object itself is the means of representation. But that's the nature of a paradigm in this context, whatever it is which is identified as "the paradigm" must represent the name, as the rule instantiated. That's why correspondence is inherently idealistic, as much as we use names to represent things, correct use of names is grounded in an ideal (the paradigm). It might bother you to hear it said that things stand for words, but it doesn't matter because Wittgenstein is rejecting this type of correspondence as unreal anyway. If he stayed on this course investigating correspondence, then when he got to numbers and mathematical names, the paradigms for correct use of these words could only be platonic forms. How could a platonic form be present to us as a paradigm?
It is. But the name is what represents - what stands for. And it bothers me because its basic semiotics. Signs stand for things. Things do not stand for signs. Again, a minor quibble.
Forget this idealisation stuff. It has nothing to do with the PI.
I did not delete it intentionally. I'm not sure what happened. I changed a couple of minor grammatical errors but must not have hit post. I retrieved the word file I had it on and re-posted from that. There were a few things in the original post that I did not have on file so what is there now is not exactly the same.
Quoting StreetlightX
He defines a paradigm as follows:
If you did not know what ‘red’ means I cannot point to something in my memory that would serve as an example or to something in your memory. Nor could you find it by searching your memory images. I might say: Do you remember that wagon you used to have? You might say in response that you remember the wagon and it was blue. Did you forget the correct name of the colors or is your memory image not accurate or did you have another wagon that was blue?
Quoting StreetlightX
In the middle of §56 he asks:
When it comes to the length of a meter we appeal to a physical standard. Memory could result in various lengths and so cannot be the paradigm for a meter.
Quoting StreetlightX
He does not say we lost the paradigm but that the situation is comparable with losing a paradigm. It is comparable because the name of the color has lost its meaning. The name does not mean anything as long as we cannot make the connection between the name and the color. But the difference is, we can still consult an example of the color, that is, a paradigm. The paradigm is not lost because there are still examples of things that are red that can be pointed to and agreed upon as red.
The reason I am pushing this is that it has bearing on the problem of a private language and related issues.
§56. Assume that there were no (external) samples available in the language, and instead "we bear in mind the colour (for instance) that a word signifies". Wittgenstein immediately diagnoses the problem with this assumption:
"But what do we regard as the criterion for remembering it right?"
W will return to this issue of an internal standard more forcefully in the private language 'argument'.
W continues on to say that if we use a sample instead of our memory-image, then there may be cases in which we seem to remember the sample as being (e.g.) darker than it was before. Therefore: "Aren't we as much at the mercy of memory as of a sample?". He appears to reject this suggestion with the following example (of a sample): "Imagine that you were supposed to paint a particular colour “C”, which was the colour that appeared when the chemical substances X and Y combined." W notes that if we seem to remember the colour produced by the chemical combination as being brighter or different than it was before, then our memory must be at fault (since it is assumed that the chemical combination always reproduces the same colour). Hence: "This shows that we do not always resort to what memory tells us as the verdict of the highest court of appeal."
Further points:
W suggests that the memory-image (i.e. our bearing in mind the colour) and our ability to recall it via memory is what makes "the colour in itself...indestructible". But he then criticises the use of a memory-image as the standard/paradigm.
W states: "(For someone might feel like saying: “If we had no memory, we would be at the mercy of a sample.”)" Although W does not say as much, it is doubtful that any language-game could be played without memory, for then we could not remember how to play it. However, the point here is not the general use of memory in the language-game, but rather the use of a memory-image as a standard in the language-game.
§57. W posits a metaphysical concept of colour: “Something red can be destroyed, but red cannot be destroyed, and that is why the meaning of the word ‘red’ is independent of the existence of a red thing.” - Certainly it makes no sense to say that the colour red (as opposed to the pigment) is torn up or pounded to bits." The next line I do not understand as I am unfamiliar with the phrase, but Wittgenstein asks whether we don't say “The red is vanishing”? The "But don't we say..." indicates Wittgenstein's objection to the metaphysical concept. If we are to assume the metaphysical concept then W will not allow us the move of relying on samples or memory-images of red, as these should not be required if red is actually independent of the existence of a red thing. Wittgenstein deflates the metaphysical concept: "For what if you cannot remember the colour any more? - If we forget which colour this is the name of, the name loses its meaning for us; that is, we’re no longer able to play a particular language-game with it. And then the situation is comparable to that in which we’ve lost a paradigm which was an instrument of our language."
On the contrary. The whole point to this first part of PI seems to be to describe how language is a rule-following activity without having to refer to ideals to account for the rules. I don't want to spoil it for you, but I've been reading ahead, and this will be made quite explicit by the time we reach #100..
In the next section, 60-63, he'll continue his attack on correspondence. He'll compare a language-game in which the named objects are "analysed", to a normal type language-game. Each of the two language-games has its advantages and disadvantages. We cannot say that the "analysed" way provides a better description than the other way, only a different description.
I conclude from this, that we can name what's in the corner of the room as "the broom", or, "the broomstick and the brush which is fitted onto it". One is just as good as the other, but something is lost in each. There is no ideal way of describing the situation, therefore no true correspondence.
I think that's roughly what @StreetlightX has been trying to say about the discussion of the term 'paradigm', but I might be wrong about that, so I thought I'd make the point separately anyway.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That was the point of my weather analogy. Are you suggesting that the statement "it will most likely rain tomorrow because a warm front is approaching" is not sufficiently 'complete' because it has not described the cause of the warm front in terms of the spatio-temporal history of each atom constituting it? Wittgenstein is writing a book about the way in which our language sometimes creates pseudo-problems that we agonise over when really they are just a non-sensical use of language. To point us in the direction of his thinking, he only need show that language cannot be analysed into a simple series of rules outside of the social context in which the language user has been raised. Just as the weather forecaster only need point to the approaching warm front to indicate that we might want to pack an umbrella tomorrow. He does not need to follow the trail to the very atoms which make up the atmosphere at that point, and Wittgenstein does not need to follow the trail back to the manner in which the neonatal brain establishes its first social rules. (Coincidentally, a small part of the research interests of a close colleague actually does cover the manner in which the neonatal brain establishes its first social rules, so if that's where your interest lies I could ask about some sources, but they'd be psychological, not philosophy.)
Wittgenstein continues in 60 to repudiate that the sense or meaning of a proposition/concept/word is somehow enlightened by some deeper analysis, as in his example about the "broom." This again points to his former thinking in the Tractatus. However, note that this analysis is not about a deeper understanding of an idea (the ideas for e.g. in the PI), but a deeper understanding of the object associated with the word. As if the meaning of broom really refers to the parts associated with the word.
If I say, "Bring me the broom," do I need some further analysis to reveal what is really meant by the statement/word? Does further analysis of the kind described in 60 really add something that's missing? And if we were to ask someone, as Wittgenstein points out, what they really meant, would they add this missing analysis, i.e., would it reveal the thinking behind the statement?
This reminds me of how people try to analyze what we really mean by the word nothing, as if there is some metaphysical thing associated with the word. You'll even find threads on the word nothing, as if there is some hidden meaning or sense in the word itself, apart from its use . If you ask me to look in a particular room to see what's in there, and after looking I say, "Nothing," - then later, you look in the room and note that there was a desk in the room, would you come back and say, "What do you mean there was nothing in the room?" You might, but we can all think of circumstances where it would be completely appropriate to use the word nothing in this situation depending on context. Now there is a difference between Wittgenstein's example in 60 and this example, but I'm pointing out that the use of a proposition/word/concept will tell us much more about meaning or sense than most anything else.
I really ought to just ignore this comment as gratuitous nonsense. But since you really seem to believe what you've said, I'll defend what I've stated.
"Ideal" will be an important term when he describes vague boundaries of concepts, inexactness. Sometimes we describe descriptions overlooking the fact that vagueness and ambiguity inheres within description, and it's as if we're looking for an "ideal language". In order to introduce his concept of a rule as a "sign-post", which allows for ambiguity, he needs to get us to reject the prejudice, that a rule is an ideal.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, as a description, it is not complete. This is the problem with descriptions, and correspondence in general, descriptions are never complete. "Complete description" is an oxymoron. Consider the part of PI before us now, 60-64. We can describe the very same situation in two distinct ways, one being the "analytical" way. Neither description gives us everything, as each is lacking in its own way. End of 63: "But can I not say that an aspect of the matter is lost on you in the latter case as well as the former?" No description is "complete". As in my discussion with StreetlightX above, Wittgenstein is moving us away from ideals such as "complete".
Quoting Isaac
This is an issue not yet resolved though. What if he cannot point us in the direction of his thinking in this way? Judging by the responses of various readers in this thread, the interpretations are starting to go in various directions. If this continues, then the pointing us in "the direction of his thinking" has failed.
Here's the problem with this claim. If Wittgenstein wants to show that terms like "perfection", "order", and consequently "rule" are not defined by words like "ideal" and 'true", it does not suffice to simply say that using words like "ideal" and "true" is misguided and wrong-headed, because that is begging the question. So it must be demonstrated, and this requires showing how things are non-ideal, and not-true, then the conclusion will be that using these words is misguided. But don't forget, at 58, how the attempt appears to contradict itself. There is a paradox here.
"Further analysed" in §60 returns to the same point. A broom maker might regard a broom as a brush and stick since he may combine various kinds of brushes and sticks. To a physicist brush and stick is no more an analysis than broom. Wittgenstein’s concern is not, of course, with brooms but with the idea of a fundamental analysis, of absolute simples:
There is a sense in which further analysis distorts our thinking. We do not understand a broom by analysis but by sweeping the floor. We do not understand a chair by analysis but by sitting on it.
You've missed a very important qualifier in my sentence. I asked if you would suggest that the reason given was not sufficiently complete, ie not complete enough to achieve its task.
This is why I think a broader view of Wittgenstein's intention is so important (as I keep mentioning) because one can only judge a philosophical endeavour, should one judge it at all, by whether it achieves what it sets out to do. It is only ever going to show some map, some model of the way things are from some particular frame. To ask completeness of it would be like complaining that a contour map did not show the vegetation completely.
I don’t think we can forgo a careful reading, an “exegesis”, of the text. The aphoristic nature of his writing does not preclude but demands just such a reading. There has been a great deal of misunderstanding as to what it is that Wittgenstein is pointing to. One of the most striking features of Wittgenstein’s work is how little agreement there is to what he is saying.
I do not think Wittgenstein intends to point to answers. So, what is he pointing to? The reader:
His work is within the therapeutic tradition of philosophy:
§60. Wittgenstein asks whether the statement "My broom is in the corner" is actually a statement about the broom's constituent parts of its broomstick and brush. He suggests that the latter statement is a "further analysed" form of the former statement, which articulates something hidden in the former. But is this what the person making the statement really meant: the constituent parts? We don't typically consider the constituent parts when we ask someone (e.g.) to hand us a broom, as this is unnecessary in most cases. W raises this point because the philosophical tendency is to think that the further analysed form is somehow better, more true, or even the goal of philosophical thinking (such as in his Tractatus).
I just want to thank you lot for the great discussion/exegesis. I hope you manage to keep it up.
§62. W supposes that the person given the order must consult a table which co-ordinates names and pictures in order to bring the required object. W asks whether the person will do the same "when he carries out an order in (a) and the corresponding one in (b)?" He answers: "Yes and no". W states that we may say the point of the two orders is the same, but it is not always going to be clear what the 'point' of the order should be. W draws an analogy to a lamp which has the essential purpose of giving light, but which also has the inessential purposes of being an ornament, filling a room, etc. W notes that there is not always a clear boundary between essential and inessential.
§63. It could be said that a sentence in (b) is an analysed form of a sentence in (a), which "readily seduces us into thinking that the former is the more fundamental form". We might think that the person with the unanalysed form is lacking something compared to the person with the analysed form who "has got it all", however "can't I say that an aspect of the matter is lost to the latter than to the former?"
§64. W proposes an altered version of language game (48) in which "names signify not monochrome squares but rectangles each consisting of two such squares". A half red, half green rectangle is called "U"; a half green, half white one called "V", etc. W asks us whether we could imagine a people who only had the combined names (i.e. "U", "V", etc.) without having the individual colour names. He asks how these symbols stand in need of analysis, and whether it possible to replace this game by (48) now that we have no names for individual colours. He asserts: "It is just a different language-game".
Really, this is a philosophical investigation with metaphysical implications. The task of a philosopher is not the same as the task of a meteorologist. In philosophy any description which clearly implies infinite regress is undoubtedly an incomplete description. But you were the one who claimed that the description was complete. And now you realize that in "view of Wittgenstein's intention", perhaps you ought not even talk in terms like "completeness".
I don't think this chimes with what Wittgenstein was trying to do at all. He's quite clear at 90-94 about the purpose of the investigation in this respect, plus a dozen mentions of it elsewhere.
Note the deliberately vague 'kinds of statement', not a complete list, not an ordered and categorised index, just a reminder of the kinds of statements.
At 91 he warns against thinking that there is something 'hidden' in the ordinary expression which analysis can reveal.
At 93 he specifically references the plight of the person who thinks that propositions are something queer as being caused by the forms that we use in expressing ourselves that "stand in his way"
I think, though, that Marie McGinn puts it best when she says that that Wittgenstein attempts "... not a systematization of the rules that govern our use of words, but an evocation of the distinctive patterns of use...". The key word there being 'evocation'. We have to pull out of focus a bit to see what Wittgenstein is trying to evoke, not focus in further to establish once and for all what a 'rule' is, or what a 'paradigm' is. To do this would be to apply the very method he is trying to advise against to his own text. I'm not intending to waste much time flogging a dead horse, but that's why I wrote that quote of Ramsey's earlier (whose thought runs through the book). This level of analysis is antithetical to the very purpose of the book. It is, to a great extent, about vagueness, the blurred boundaries of a concept, the inexactness of a definition.
If you're going to pay such close attention to the words used, then at least do so without prejudice. Take a look back over the sections we've covered already and count how many times Wittgenstein has used modal expressions... might, not for all, a large class, maybe, sometimes.. etc. If his exact choice of words is to be considered important, then what is to be made of his inclusion of modality in virtually every proposition except those about the philosophical method, about which he uses completely different language... all, not, always... etc.
As I say, I'm not going to continue flogging a dead horse, if you, and others, are committed to an elucidatory exegesis, then this is perhaps not the place to try and convince you otherwise, but it's going to feel like two separate conversations are going on (unless we have any doctrinal readers here, in which case, three).
If you have already determined the task of the philosopher then I don't think you're going to get much out of this text.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I claimed it was "sufficiently" complete, a fact I already pointed out once that you had overlooked, such that your now continuing to do so seems disingenuous.
Actually I only said what the task of philosophy is not. It's not the same as the task of the meteorologist. This was to show the irrelevance of your analogy. What are you suggesting, that anyone with basic level training in philosophy won't get anything out of the book? Why might that be?
.Quoting Isaac
Such a description might be "sufficiently" complete for meteorology, as per your analogy. But my studies of philosophy have taught me that in philosophy, a description which leads to infinite regress is one which is incomplete and needs further investigation. That's why I rejected your claim that the description is sufficiently complete, despite your effort to justify the claim with that analogy. The analogy does not serve the purpose, and in my judgement the description is not sufficiently complete, for the reason stated..
Isn't what you are doing here exegetic?
Quoting Isaac
Isn't that something that becomes clear through from a careful reading of the text?
Quoting Isaac
I agree. It is not a question of determining a precise meaning of a word but of eliminating misunderstandings of what he means when he uses the word. This is exactly what you are doing when you point to modal expressions. A careful reading of the text does not commit one to " trying to fit [what is vague] into an exact logical category". Ramsey also warns against: "laziness and wooliness".
`
Yes, I'm not suggesting no exegesis, I'm advising against too close-focused an exegesis which I think is at risk here. The examination of sections without reference to the wider project, or other texts I think risks misunderstanding, but I didn't mean to make such a big deal of it, I only intended it to be a suggestion as to a direction I thought might help resolve some problems.
Quoting Fooloso4
No, I don't think it does, at least not in real time, as it were. I think, if it's going to become clear it will most likely be by comparing the section in question to the wider project, other sections and other notes Wittgenstein made. Wittgenstein's style is too aphoristic to yield to interpretation simply by the terms of the section alone.
Quoting Fooloso4
Absolutely, and I wouldn't want to position myself against a careful reading, I'm specifically arguing against a strict section-by-section exegesis of terminology, which, to me, reads too much like categorisation, but if that's the process people here prefer then that's fine, I just wanted to make a suggestion.
I agree. If you read my comments you will see that I have been making connections with earlier sections as well as with the Tractatus. I have held off making connections with later sections since they have not been discussed, with the exception of a general comment about not confusing paradigms, which are said to be an instrument of language, with something private, something in the memory because this relates to the later discussion of a private language.
Quoting Isaac
I think we are in agreement on this. The details do not come into proper focus until the larger picture is seen. From too close a painting may look like blobs of paint, from too far away the details are lost. But this does not mean that there is one correct perspective. Seeing blobs of paint is not the problem and may be of value, but if all one sees are blobs of paint then one missed the big picture.
The big picture with regard to the sections under discussion is the rejection of Tractarian objects and analysis of simples and compounds. From my first post:
I'm not sure I see how, but perhaps I'm missing something. An aphorism is supposed to evoke something in the reader. That something is not 'hidden' in the terminology, it arises in the reader as a result of their 'seeing' what the author means.
This is a point which dogs the elucidatory reading in general. We cannot 'get outside of language' to discuss language. We cannot determine that we understand the meaning of a discussion about meaning. These things must be shown, words are used to evoke the same sense the author has, not to relate it directly in a one-to-one correspondence of word and meaning.
It seems we're largely in agreement then, I simply got confused by your original response that "I don’t think we can forgo a careful reading, an “exegesis”, of the text. The aphoristic nature of his writing does not preclude but demands just such a reading.", which sounded to me like the solution to textual confusions lay in a closer examination, as if the meaning were hidden within the text.
I'd say the same to this as I said to MU above. The aphorisms are meant to evoke a sense in the reader, we cannot 'wring' sense out of them.
But maybe you already share this notion and I simply misunderstood the intent behind your approach.
This may just be a turn of phrase and carry no indication of your thought on the matter, but I'd dispute the idea that Wittgenstein is making any ontological claim here. He's not saying that there is or is not a clear boundary, as if this were a fact of the world. He's saying that he is not defining a boundary, because there is no need. One could define a boundary, it's not that some state of affairs prevents this from being possible, just that it is not necessary.
Yes, you're right, I see what you mean by it now.
§58 is a dialectical nightmare. Here’s what I think is going on in it. It seems to me that there’s a kind of thesis-antithesis-synthesis structure going on here, where the thesis and antithesis are, respectively,
[Thesis]: the idea that “red exists” is a statement about Red qua Thing; and
[Antithesis]: the idea that “red exists” is a statement about Red qua meaning. Hence the ‘opposition’:
(eg. 1) §58: "If “X exists” amounts to no more than “X” has a meaning a then it is not [Thesis:] a sentence which treats of X, but [Antithesis]: a sentence about our use of language, that is, about the use of the word “X”."
(eg. 2) §58: "[Thesis]: It looks to us as if we were saying something about the nature of red in saying that the words “Red exists” do not make sense … [Antithesis]: But what we really want is simply to take “Red exists” as the statement: the word “red” has a meaning.”
Having posed these two ‘opposing’ takes, Witty then runs through some resulting ‘contradictions’, both of which follow from ‘taking the side’ of the Antithesis [‘red exists’ = meaning of red], against the Thesis [‘red exists’ = red Thing]:
§58: [Contradiction 1]: "the expression actually contradicts itself in the attempt to say that just because red exists ‘in and of itself’”.
§58: [Contradiction 2]: "Whereas the only contradiction lies in something like this: the sentence looks as if it were about the colour, while it is supposed to be saying something about the use of the word “red”."
The end of the section - what might be called synthesis, or maybe even better, dismissal - rubbishes the whole enterprise above, by simply acknowledging that "In reality … we quite readily say that a particular colour exists, and that is as much as to say that something exists that has that colour.”
The open question then is what this whole dialectical movement between thing, meaning, and then dismissal/synthesis is meant to show. I think that the point is to show that there is no ‘opposition’ between existence and meaning, and that insisting on the one does not preclude the other: it is both perfectly possible to say that ‘red exists’ - we do it all the time, ‘in reality’ - and that in doing so, we can still talk about our use of the word.
The last puzzle (for me) I want to address is the lemma that closes the discussion, the qualification: "particularly where ‘what has the colour’ is not a physical object.” - I think the idea is that 'existence’ here is not at all tied to ‘physical objects’ - we may well speak of ‘fictional objects’ and still employ the expression ‘red exists’ - this again being related to the ‘non-opposition' between existence and meaning’, and the attempt to ‘de-metaphysicalize’ the notion of existence.
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Sorry this is a long one - disproportionate to the length of the section - but its a really tough one so I’ve had to try and dig at it. Still not totally happy with the exegesis and I think I’ve missed some details (particularly with respect to the ‘contradictions’ - I still don’t quite get how they are derived), but I think I got the general structure and motivation right, hopefully.
§59 replaces the ‘elements’ of §48 with ‘constituent parts’: this vocabulary has the advantage of being a lot less metaphysically loaded than ‘elements’ which tend to carry with them connotations of ultimate-bits-beyond-which-one-can’t-go. ‘Constituent parts’ by contrast are a lot more ambiguous insofar they are relational: a constituent part of something is only a 'part' in relation to the thing it is a constituent of: thing being the case even if it is a ‘simple constituent part’, like the chair leg which is not said to be ‘composed of different pieces of wood’, unlike the chair back.
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@“fdrake”: appreciate the appreciation :D
§60 is long, but its quite a bit of fun. The basic question is this: is it the same to say that ‘the broom is in the corner’ as it is to say that ‘the stick of the broom and the brush of the broom are in the corner’? Witty’s answer is kinda like this:
Before veering more like this:
I like to think that this 2nd gif captures the PI's general orientation to metaphysics as a whole.
Jokes aside though, I would say that the question of motivation, of 'the point' of making such a distinction (and identification), becomes the central theme of the next few sections.
Notice that it requires the reader "seeing" what the author means, And since an aphorism is brief, there is a need for strict passage by passage interpretation to see them all.
I think that's very good, considering the difficulty of the passage. Did you read my interpretation from a few days ago: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/242060 ? I focused on how the attempt to say what the phrase must mean, to be meaningful, appears to contradict itself. Witty offers a resolution, which you say 'rubbishes the whole enterprise", and this is a sort of compromise situation, that "red exists" means that there is something which has the colour.
But as I discussed with Fooloso4, this doesn't really capture the imaginary scenario. In the imagination one might say "there is a colour named red", and therefore "red" would have meaning as an unseen colour, without there being something which has that colour, even in the imagination. So "red" can be given meaning through a logical necessity (definition) without needing that there is something which has the colour, even in the mind.
I feel the same way you do about 58. I've read it several times, and I still feel as though I'm missing something. It's probably just about use, as opposed to some ontological meaning we're attributing to a particular context (not sure). It would be interesting to see how this applies when philosophizing.
Agreed! This section was difficult. I'm not sure about the thesis-antithesis reading, even though that's how I originally read it. I wasn't satisified with my previous post on §58, so I've had another go. Hopefully this adds something to further clarify the matter.
Note that the opening paragraph is in quotation marks, (possibly) signalling that it is being spoken by Wittgenstein's interlocutor and/or by someone with a metaphysical/Platonist attitude.
Wittgenstein's interlocutor appears to be using the term 'name' in the Platonic sense given at §46. Wittgenstein says at §46, quoting the Theaetetus: "...everything that exists in and of itself can be signified only by names; no other determination is possible, either that it is or that it is not ... But what exists in and of itself has to be ... named without any other determination."
'Red' is therefore a name (which signifies a simple) in the Platonic sense. Note also that the meaning of the name is being (illicitly) identified with its "object" here.
Is this Wittgenstein's or Plato's view? Is Wittgenstein applying his concept of 'meaning is use' here? Or is he simply following Plato's metaphysical assumption that we are unable to attribute existence and non-existence to simples, which therefore leads him to say that ""X exists" amounts to no more than "X" has a meaning"?
Or, is this instead a natural inference from the previous statement that "if there were no red it could not be spoken of at all"? Therefore, if there is red then it can be spoken of, i.e., if "X exists" then (this amounts to) "X has a meaning".
I tend to think it is the latter.
The view that "the words "Red exists" do not make sense" leads us to think that this has metaphysical implications regarding "the nature of red" (the "object") itself.
Instead of adopting the metaphysical view, what we really want is to replace the empirical statement with the grammatical statement.
Platonists do not take "Red exists" to be saying "the word "red" has a meaning"; Platonists instead want it to be a statement about the nature of red (i.e. about the colour itself). However, the expression "Red exists" actually contradicts itself in the attempt to say that ("Red exists") precisely because the Platonic view does not allow the attribution of existence to red ("in and of itself").
Clear enough, I think.
In reality - which the metaphysical viewpoint is not - there is no problem in saying that red exists, where this is used to mean that something exists which is red. Saying "Red exists" is no less accurate than saying "something exists which is red", particularly where that something does not physically exist (e.g. it may exist as a memory, or as a fictional object). [This stumped me at first but I think StreetlightX may be right about the reference to fictional objects.]
The ‘steps’ in the argument are kinda like this:
(1) “Red exists” makes no sense [opening statement, in quotation marks].
(2) [Unstated]: Therefore, we shouldn’t even be able to say anything meaningful about this, even in the negative, in the same way in which we wouldn’t be able to say anything meaningful about “mcfluffly mcglumpglumps”. This kind of thing is ‘not even wrong’.
(3) But we do want to say something about “red exists” - there is a point we want to make about it, and that point is that “red exists” ‘means’ that ‘red has meaning’ (and conversely, ‘red doesn’t exist' ‘means’ that ‘red has no meaning’).
(4) But we can’t say this because we just said that ‘red exists’ doesn’t have a meaning! So ‘red exists’ can’t mean ‘red has meaning’.
(5) So all we can say is that if ‘red exists’ did mean something, it would mean that ‘red has meaning’ (But of course “red exists" doesn’t mean anything!).
(5.1) So we can’t say that red exists 'means' red has meaning. This ‘contradicts itself’. [It can't both have a meaning, and not mean anything].
(6) So the “only contradiction” lies in the attempt to claim that the statement “red exists” ‘really means’ “red has meaning” [because the whole premise is that “red exists” has no meaning!].
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Therefore! Forget the either/or choice between either ‘red exists is about red itself’ or ‘red exists’ is about the meaning of the use of the word red’. We can simply say, in all innocence, that ‘red exists’, and all this is to say is that something is red - and this ‘something’ need not commit us ontologically to anything in particular - it doesn’t have to be a ‘physical object’.
I'm much more comfortable with this reading than with my previous one. Could have got here earlier had I read the thread more closely. This is close to @Metaphysician Undercover's reading, but deviates from the conclusion MU draws: Witty doesn't opt for 'red exists = red has meaning' - the whole point is to show the error in this approach.
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[Wrote this before I wrote the above:] Also, I completely missed the conversation about §58 on the previous pages though I was looking out for one. @Luke's point, about how the existence or not of red is analogous to the Paris rule being neither a meter nor not a meter long, is one I wanted to make as well, but left out in order to emphasize other things. Glad someone made it explicit:
Quoting Luke
Quoting StreetlightX
Reading §58, the first thing that jumps out to me is how the context of W.'s discussion changes over the passage. The first paragraph with scare quotes around it looks to me as a first attempt at covering W's desired ground provisionally, to show what he intends by means of an approximation. This approximation is successively refined and worked out over the course of §58. The shifts in context are what make it difficult, I feel.
[quote=Wittgenstein]"I want to restrict the term 'name* to what cannot occur in
the combination 'X exists'.—Thus one cannot say 'Red exists', because if there were no red it could not be spoken of at all."—Better: If "X exists" is meant simply to say: "X" has a meaning,—then it is not a proposition which treats of X, but a proposition about our use of language, that is, about the use of the word "X".[/quote]
I think we have a reference to bipolarity in the first bit with the scare quotes. We cannot say that red exists in usual contexts involving the use of the word red because it would make no sense to say that it did not exist. 'Exists' and 'not exists' are the two poles, each the negation of the other, which are providing the litmus test of sense here. I think it's similar to the meter stick example. In the meter stick example, we have the Paris meter providing the paradigm of what it means to say that an object is 1 meter long in a language game of measurements. In this example, which does not have a specifically attached context/language game, it seems that 'red exists' and 'red does not exist' analogise to 'the Paris meter is 1 meter long' and 'the Paris meter is not 1 meter long'; red serves as a paradigm by which we represent placeholders which count as red. Counting as red meant in a deflationary sense of simply counting as red in a language game involving colours. So it looks to me as if the first paragraph is scoping over various colour language games, and generalises from these implicitly treated language games that 'red exists' is senseless; an illegitimate move in most language games involving red.
Another way of putting it, the kind of language game in which the statement 'red exists' is a legitimate move is not a typical language game involving red! @Luke highlights that considering the statement 'red exists' introduces an on-the-fly context change to make sense of, we are no longer considering most practical uses of language involving red, we're playing a more abstract game using the same word. Wittgenstein highlights this shift too in the second paragraph, and the 'it looks as if' the second paragraph begins with seems to me to highlight that Wittgenstein's thoughts are covering a variety of language games involving red. So onto the second paragraph:
Saying something about the nature of red is not something done or doable in typical language games involving it. Playing the move 'red exists' is something we can understand however; there are language games in which it has a sense; but we only give it sense here (illegitimately) through the fungibility of context which accompanies uses of language. What is illegitimate, I think W. thinks, is to situate 'red exists' within typical language games involving red.
It's at this point that §58 really grows its teeth, attempting to destroy the ground of the philosophical transformation that occurs to red when unmoored from language games in which it serves as a paradigm. [hide='examples of games where red serves as a paradigm, I think]Examples where red serves as a paradigm are for the square game, colour ascription, or use as part of a description.[/hide]
What philosophical move does Wittgenstein want to prohibit and why? I think Wittgenstein wants to prohibit the following line of thought:
[quote='me with my Platonist type-token distinction hat on']We see when we look around that things have colours, and one of these colours is red. If we subtract away the things which are red, we are left with the same underlying conception that applied in each instance. That underlying conception is the meaning of red, but the use of that underlying conception requires a really existing colour type, red, independent of every red object.[/quote]
which is a rephrasing of what the interlocutor says in W's §57:
How he seeks to prohibit this is to show that the inference 'if we subtract away the things which are red, then we are left with the same underlying conception that applied in each instance' is illegitimate. It is illegitimate because it requires a conflation of red when serving as facilitator of representation (a paradigm) and red when serving more abstractly as a concept. This conflation is specifically undercut by the bipolarity principle: how can we say red can or cannot be destroyed when serving as a paradigm? Simply by forgetting that it is serving as a paradigm in one instance; the 'colour ascription' context inherent in 'subtracting away the red things', in the antecedent of the inference... And no longer treating it as a paradigm in the consequent of the inference. Red 'could not be destroyed' in the first instance because of how red is used in that context, and we arrive at a red type independent of language use precisely through the elimination of exemplars of the paradigm.
It is as if we removed all objects to be measured from the Paris meter stick measuring game, then inferred the a-priori, use independent existence of the meter as a standard. Perhaps we can forget the use of the meter as a standard in some instances of mathematical calculation involving dimensionally consistent lengths, but that calculating language game does not use the meter as a paradigm for/during its moves.
The whole issue deflates when treating red in a deflationary, entirely sortal manner, what red is is what counts as red; what roles red serves in our language games. W. closes the discussion in §58 by showing us contexts in which it does, however, make sense to say 'red exists'.
This is because meaning is use, and we cannot neglect that premise. We do use "red" in this way, as if it names something, e.g. "red is a colour". That is what causes the appearance of contradiction, we must submit to the fact that the word is used in such a way that "red" refers to an existing thing. Wittgenstein offers a resolution to the contradiction.
In the next section is an extensive discussion of the nature of concepts. here is what I consider to be exemplar passages:
One could define a boundary --- for a particular purpose.
The first line, one I think I brought out above and more clearly articulated by Witty, is that of the pendular movement between claiming 'red exists' = 'red has meaning', and the rubbishing of this claim.
The second line is the one both Luke and you are bringing out, which is the limited linguistic scope of a phrase like 'red exists', which only makes sense in a certain context - much like the claim about the length of the Paris rule. This helps alot in understanding the motivation behind the otherwise curious argument in the first line of thought.
Good stuff!
Wittgenstein's interlocutor (and Wittgenstein at times himself, I think) want to restrict language in some way. To lay down a rule that such-and-such simply can't be said (or at least not meaningfully) but this steps outside of the role Wittgenstein has assigned to his philosophy, and he ends up saying that the expression must have meaning - because it is used. The philosophical task is to determine how it could mean something by what role it plays. Hence Wittgenstein ends up with that it means something exists which is red. But of note, to me, anyway, is the lacklustre way in which the way "red exists" can have sense is presented. What should (in an elucidatory manner) be the answer is tacked on to the end like an afterthought. Its reads to me as if Wittgenstein is saying "oh, and" red exists" can mean something if you look at it like this, but that doesn't really matter". What matters is how we dealt with the interlocutor, not the answer derived in so doing.
There were a couple of things I wanted to add, I'll also take that response from Street as an invitation to spell out explicitly the 'contradiction' referenced in §58.
So, I'm a bit confused by the precise sense in which Witty diagnoses the contradiction; what conceptual machinery does he have going in the background that makes 'contradiction' an appropriate choice of word here? First to spell out the contradiction as I see it.
Witty posits that red is used as a paradigm in most language games in which red plays a role. The existence of red is not the kind of thing that makes sense to ponder or raise when, say, matching tins of paint to colours on a chart or describing someone's hair. This means that 'red exists' and 'red does not exist' play no role in those language games, and thus can be said to be senseless in their native contexts. Wittgenstein leverages this insight to block an inference from a 'game of subtraction' of red exemplars to their supposedly underlying/grounding type of red, or the 'indestructible' redness. This inference is blocked by, as Wittgenstein calls it, a contradiction.
For more detail about how I see the rest of §58 look at this post. Now I'm focussing only on the contradiction which blocks the inference. The inference, as I construed it in the previous post, was:
In the antecedent, 'If...instance', red is treated as a paradigm in the language game of colour subtraction. This means that 'red exists' and 'red does not exist' equally do not apply. However, red loses its status as a paradigm in the consequent of the inference because 'red is a really existing colour type'. In the consequent, the requirements of sense are that red is not playing the role of a paradigm, in the antecedent, the requirements of sense are that red is playing the role of a paradigm. In moving antecedent to consequent, we necessarily suppress the requirement that 'red exists' is senseless which is encoded in treating red as a paradigm.
The bit I'm having trouble with is whether we can actually treat the requirement that 'red exists' is senseless as a typical premise in a syllogism. Wittgenstein seems aware that this isn't quite right in how he introduces the logic of the 'contradiction'
we have a modality in the presentation here, that we must make the equivalence between 'red does not exist' and 'red has no meaning', conflating existence and having sense as Street focussed on in his exegesis. But that modality - of necessity - seems to operate on something like an a priori register with respect to the language games considered; on the conditions of sense making in the considered language games; so this is really a 'philosophical' move Wittgenstein is making. It's a conceptual link forged with a certain logical (grammatical?) necessity.
So Wittgenstein sees the contradiction as necessarily arising in going from the antecedent to the consequent, it 'comes along with' and 'acts as a guarantor of' the inference, speaking very loosely. Nevertheless, there are ways at 'arriving' at 'red exists' without making this abuse of a logic of sense, at the end Wittgenstein highlights that:
so the sense of necessity Wittgenstein looks to be dealing with isn't something that blocks the sense 'red exists' in all contexts, it just blocks it in the sense he was dealing with. A very circumscribed sense of necessity, in contrast to the haphazard forging of necessary conceptual links that he's literally criticising in §58!
It looks to me like there's a lot going on 'under the bonnet' in §58, and we might do well to return to it once we have other examples of Wittgenstein making similar conceptual links.
Related to this, I think anyway, is that there's a real 'screw you philosophy' feel to §58, I think this comes from the two things W. thinks he's established:
(1) That we cannot infer the independent existence of red the colour from its examples without the previously discussed deaf ear for context.
(2) Nevertheless, we absolutely can say the things which were philosophically illegitimate to derive from the considered context. 'Red exists as an independent type' in the philosophical sense derived from the 'subtraction'/destruction exercise? Nah. 'Red exists' from a different point of departure? Sure!
How this resonates with me is that it introduces a certain mutilation of conceptual inferences, and something like a 'relativisation' of the a priori to an a priori for a (family of?) language game(s?) (I'm referencing this 'locally circumscribed' sense of necessity W. seems to be using). The access to the eternal and the true realm of abstraction through philosophical contemplation of essences is not an adequate take on what it means to think philosophically. The inquiry's point of departure; more generally how it interfaces with the contexts and content it uses as grist; matter a lot. So much so in fact that it's easy to wind up in a dead end of malformed questions that aren't a jot relevant to their supposed subject matter.
The last paragraph should be taken with a whole pood of salt.
There really is a lot going on in §58 huh.
I have been working on a more detailed reading of §58. Trying to make some of the connections clearer:
If we want to understand §58 we first need to understand the assumptions that inform the opening statement. A name according to this view signifies an element of reality (§59). The elements of reality, simples, are not things that exist but that out of which what exists is constructed. (§50). Just as the world is constructed logically from the combination of simples, language is constructed logically from the combination of names, which picture or represent simples. The name ‘red’ signifies just such a simple. If there were no red there would be no things that exist that are red and no statements about red.
W. is rejecting the Tractarian logical connection between the world and language, the connection between names and simple elements.
It looks as though the rejection of the statement “Red exists” entails a metaphysical statement, an affirmation of the independence of red from things that exist. In addition, an affirmation that red is one of the timeless, indestructible, simple objects. But W. wants to dispel these metaphysical assumptions.
We know what ‘red’ means. If red did not exist it would have no meaning. We might say that a square circle does not exist, but this is to say that a square circle has no meaning.
If red exists in its own right then the rejection of the combination of the name/element and exists is contradictory. Again, §50 shows the underlying assumptions that led to the rejection of the existence or being of elements:
Once the simple/complex and name/object relations are rejected, the distinction between existence of "red" and meaning or use of "red" are disentangled.
There is nothing problematic about saying that red exists or that things exist that are red. As to what has that color but is not a physical object perhaps he is referring to pigments or light. There is a collection “Remarks on Colour”, but I don’t know how much light it will shed on the current sections of the PI.
.
and concludes:
So I think StreetlightX and yourself got it just about right: Wittgenstein rejects both the metaphysical and metalinguistic roles. In reality, "Red exists" is used to denote neither that red exists (in and of itself) nor that "red" has a meaning, but "merely...that there are things thus coloured".
I also skimmed through this collection prior to my first post on section 58, and I agree that it sheds little light on these concerns. Thanks for the detailed reading :up:
Red itself is not the paradigm here. The paradigm is a sample, an example of a red thing, which gives meaning to the word "red". This paradigm may be a physical object, or in the mind. That is Wittgenstein's resolution to the apparent contradiction. "Red" has no meaning unless there is a paradigm to demonstrate red. So "red exists" has no meaning, because "red" has no meaning, unless there is an example of something red, be it a physical object or in the mind. The appearance of contradiction is avoided, because that's all that "red exists" means, that there is such a sample of red, to give the word "red" meaning .
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't see that we ever really say "red exists", though. At least, I've never used the phrase outside of a philosophical discussion... However, Wittgenstein is not saying that we don't use this phrase (at §58); just that if we do, then it is typically used to mean that there is something which has that colour.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What he suggests is that "what has that colour" can also include non-physical objects, i.e., in addition to physical objects. He is neither excluding physical objects from being coloured, nor implying that only memory-images can be coloured.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is not what he is trying to do. He is demonstrating problems with the metaphysical/Tractarian view of names; a view which can be traced back to Plato. For example, from the Tractatus:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I agree that the word "red" gets its meaning from its use in the language. However, with regards to your example, the statement "red is a colour" is typically something that might only be said when teaching somebody the meaning of the word "red" (or "colour"). Per Wittgenstein's remarks in On Certainty, it would in most cases be highly unusual and out of place to utter this statement amongst a group of fluent speakers (again: outside of a philosophical discussion).
It is implied that red is a thing which exists when we say things like "red is a colour". So we do use red in this way, like if I were to say "I know what red is", or "red is my favourite colour", etc.. I agree that Wittgenstein's solution is to say that what this means is that there is something which has that colour.
But as per my discussion with Fooloso4 on this subject, I am not convinced of this solution. We can say "red is a colour", and "red" can have meaning, in that context of being designated as a colour, without there being anything which has that colour. We can know "red is a colour" without there being anything which has that colour. So it appears like we can give words like "red" a meaning through a definition like that, so that the word has meaning within that logical structure, without the necessity of there being a thing which has the colour red. So it seems to me that Wittgenstein's solution doesn't really capture what it means for "red" to exist in the imagination. There doesn't need to be a thing which has the colour red, for "red" to have meaning, because "red" can have meaning by definition (or context within a logical structure).
Quoting Luke
I disagree. I think we commonly use "red", as well as the other colours in this way. For example: "Red is my favourite colour". "I pick red as the colour to paint my room." "What colour is it?" "The primary colours." "The colours of the rainbow." "Blue is the colour of the sky". And so on.
But notice that there seems to be a special requirement. "Red" is used here in the context of "colour", and it is this context of usage which gives the impression that red is an independent thing. It isn't an independent thing though, because it relies on this necessary relation with "colour" for its existence (via usage) as a thing.. This is the "essentialism", or necessity within a concept, which Wittgenstein may be trying to reject, or at least showing that it can be rejected. When red is defined as necessarily a colour, it gets existence as a thing, by being restricted to being a member of that category, "colour". We see this with the numerals, 1,2,3,4, they signify individual things because what they signify is necessarily a number, a definite thing, and nothing else. In Wittgenstein's upcoming discussion of concepts, he removes all of this nonsense of a constructed necessity, (boundaries are constructed for a purpose), to get down to the bare bones of what a concept really is.
§61-§64 is an extended discussion about the difference and/or similarities between the two ways of playing the ‘game’ set out at the end of §60. I’m going to treat these sections together. To recall, the game is one in which either (1) only composites have names; or (2) only parts have names and the composites are described by means of them.
Without getting too far into it, Witty basic point seems to be: the two ways of playing the game can be identified, but it is not necessary that they are. As per his modus operandi at this point, Witty makes their identification hinge upon a conditional: if certain conditions hold, then they can be identified. If not… well, there’s no reason to assume the identity of the two ways of playing the game. As to what conditions these might be, Witty basically leaves this open - those conditions cannot be specified in advance. They’re the sort of thing that require examination ‘close up’ (§51).
That all said, Witty does make the stronger point that it is important not to make any assumptions about the identity of the two ways of playing the game: doing so might ‘seduce us’ (§63) into thinking that (2) is a ‘more fundamental form’ of (1), playing an explanatory role with respect to it. But this ought to not be the case if any attempt to identify the two ways of playing the game is conditional upon certain conditions holding. Basically, its important not to be ‘seduced’ into thinking in the manner of §46 - the passage of the Theaetetus - where simples always serves to explain composites.
Note, in this connection, how a great deal of the preceding discussion between §46 and now has been about actually qualifying Socrates’ statement (in a way that changes its status drastically): yes there are some cases in which simples cannot be ‘further analyzed’ (the Paris rule is neither a meter not not a meter long; red neither can be said to exist or not exist), but this is the case only if (conditionals again!) those simples play particular roles in particular language games. The conditioning here is grammatical (and thus revisible) and not metaphysical (and thus fixed), as it were. Hence why §64 ends by simply arguing that the two ‘ways of playing the game’ can in certain circumstances simply correspond to different language-games altogether (one in which the ‘simples’ have different roles in each, I imagine).
Anyway, if what I’ve written here has the flavour of a summary, it’s because I think these parts serve to ‘end’ the discussion simples and composites began in §46. So, zooming out so far the PI has covered something like:
§1-§27: Imperatives (block! slab!)
§28-§36: Demonstratives (this, that)
§37-§45: Names (Nothung, Mr. N.N.)
—
§46-§64: Linguistic Roles (Simples, Composites, and Iterations thereof)
I don't see what you're getting at here except that we can make up a name for a non-existent colour (when would we ever use such a name?). Anyhow, what does this have to do with the phrase "Red exists" or our preceding discussion?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
My comments were made in response to your use of the statement "Red is a colour", not any of these other statements.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't think anybody is questioning whether red is a colour.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't see it as "getting down" to any "bare bones". He just tries to describe, and urges us to "look and see" (§66), how language is actually used. §93 may also be relevant here.
Perhaps it is because our readings of the text are so far removed, but I find your comments to be quite disconnected from the text. Given that we are trying to read it together, could you please provide more references to the text to support your assertions in future. This may help to reduce confusion and determine where/how you disagree.
Yeah, well you crack on with that, I don't want to sound like I'm telling people what they should do.
This is as much aimed at the other posts as yours, but, the kind of onanistic scholasticism that this whole thread has shown is not for me so I'll duck out of this one.
I mean, two pages of self-congratulatory fake 'eureka' to arrive at the basic standard Hacker and Baker interpretation of a single aphorism which I can only presume (from the level of implied scholarship) that everyone has already read. So what was the point? I just don't get it.
I hope these interpretations are just Hacker and Baker interpretations. I know I don't use Hacker and Baker, most of my interpretations are my own.
What drew me to Wittgenstein was the fact that there was so little agreement as to what he meant. He was an interpretative challenge. The following points to what is at issue.
In an early draft of the foreword to Philosophical Remarks:
Secondary literature is just that, secondary. I read Hacker and Baker when I first wrestled with Wittgenstein. I did not find them helpful and found much that I disagreed with. If I struggle with the text only to arrive where Hacker and Baker or anyone else has already been then so be it.
[quote="Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "Reading and Writing""]Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.
It is no easy task to understand unfamiliar blood; I hate the reading idlers.
He who knoweth the reader, doeth nothing more for the reader. Another century of readers—and spirit itself will stink.[/quote]
Replace "red" with the made up colour, let's call it "X". Suppose someone proposes that we combine a specified multiplicity of precise wavelengths of light, for a lab experiment or some other purpose, and we call this colour "X". The point is that "X" has meaning but it has not yet been created, and not yet been seen. So "X" has meaning even though there is nothing, not a physical object, nor in the mind, which has that colour. It's getting off track of the text, just an opinion. but I just thought I'd put that out there as a possibility. Words like "red" may be given meaning through definition. We can define things into existence, if imaginary things qualify as having existence. Isn't this like Sam26's example of "God"?
Quoting Sam26
Quoting Luke
Do you not find that my quoted passages from 65-77 are a good indication of what Wittgenstein is doing in that section? https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/243311 What do you think I'm missing, or misrepresenting?
Quoting Isaac
What can I say? If you don't enjoy it ... It's not like your parents are forcing you to go in with the Boy Scouts.
Since correct terminology appears to be important to you, just let me inform you that Wittgenstein does not use "identity" here, nor does he discuss identifying the different forms that the two distinct language games may take (according to my translation). He actually seems quite critical of their assigned identities as "analysed" and "unanalysed" forms.
What he talks about is whether the orders of the two distinct language games have "the same meaning", whether they achieve "the same" thing, whether the person who carries out the orders does "the same" thing. So he is asking whether the two distinct orders (as distinct language games) are actually two forms of the same order. He concludes that each "form" of expressing the order [misleading in this representation of mine, because it's not really one order but two distinct orders], is in it's own way deficient.
"—But can I not say that an aspect of the matter is lost on you in the latter case as well as the former?"
The fun is in the exercise, not only the results; each section is like a math problem - the answers are probably out there - in the back of the book, as it were - but the exegetical engagement 'from within' is - for me anyway - alot more intellectually stimulating and rewarding.
Maybe me using 'red' as a paradigm was wrong. The intention I had was to portray red as a facilitator of comparison rather than simply as entities subject to that comparison. As W says in §50, explicating his use of 'paradigm':
and refines this function in the parenthetical sentence at the end of §53.
but if 'sample' was the correct word to use for 'facilitator of comparison' in both the Paris meter discussion and the discussion of 'red', that's fine.
I'm not doing any of the heavy lifting here, so it's very likely that I'm play too fast and loose with the context of discussion. Regardless, though, I think the point I was making was pretty clear judging from Luke and Street's reactions, I doubt this (possible) error I made disrupts my exegesis too much.
Okay, but it's just not clear to me what you're arguing for or against here. Is it something in particular that Wittgenstein has said? Something seemingly related to this is what Wittgenstein says at the end of §58:
However, Wittgenstein is talking about the coloured object being non-physical or perhaps fictional, whereas you appear to be talking about the colour (itself) being non-physical. I don't follow why you are raising this possibility.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, your quoting of Wittgenstein gives a good indication of what Wittgenstein is doing. I'm more trying to understand what you are doing, which is why I have requested you to support your assertions/questions with textual references.
§65 serves as something like a transitional discussion, which both picks up from the previous section (i.e. sections §46-§64), and serves to introduce a new line of inquiry. If §51 implored us to look at what happens 'in detail' across various cases, and if §53 spoke of 'various possibilities' of how language-games make signs correspond to things, and if alot of the discussion so far has been iterating through the various and variable roles that words and can take on in language games - in short, if what has been so far focused on is difference and variety, §65 begins to broach the question of similarity - it asks about the 'general form of the proposition', and of what can be said about this general form (of which, one imagines, the various 'cases' have been 'species', as in genera-species).
And to this Witty simply says: there's nothing invariant across all the different cases taken under consideration so far - there are 'affinities', but not some hard core in common between them all. The proceeding discussion will elaborate on this.
Maybe I'm just misreading, but this seems to overlook that one of Wittgenstein's main motivations in the Tractatus was the discovery/development of the general form of the proposition (e.g. TLP 4.5, TLP 5.47, TLP 6).
I agree. The fundamental point of the rejection of the Tractatus is that W. had sublimed the logic of language (PI 38, PI 89). That there is a general form of a proposition is based on assumptions regarding the fixed logical structure that underlies language (and the world).
Right, so what I was pointing out, is that I thought that Wittgenstein's representation of the imaginary "red" was not quite correct (I had a slight disagreement). Notice that at 58 he wanted to replace "red exists" with "the word 'red' has meaning", but the attempt appeared to contradict itself. He resolves the contradiction, by admitting that "In reality, however, we quite readily say that a particular colour exists", with the following qualification as to what this means, "and that is as much as to say
that something exists that has that colour".
So let me explain my disagreement. He has allowed that "exists" can refer to imaginary colours. But when he says this means "something exists that has that colour", and allows that "'what has that colour' is not a physical object", I think that he doesn't properly represent how an "imaginary colour" really exists. It is not a case of a non-physical object having the colour red, it is a case of a definition. So the colour "red" is defined into existence, as an object, just like the mathematical objects are defined into existence. They exist as objects so long as the definition is adhered to
This relates directly to his description of concepts at 68-80. Notice at 68-69, there is no defined boundary to the concept "game". We can however draw a boundary (definition), for a specific purpose. At 70, he describes the concept of "game" as "uncircumscribed". This word relates right back to #3, where he talks about producing a definition for a specific purpose. The definition circumscribes the area.
Then at 75, he's back onto this idea, asking if to know what a game is, but not be able to say what it is, is like an "unformulated definition". But this is problematic because at 76, if someone draws a boundary (formulates a definition) it wouldn't be the same boundary that I would draw.
So, in all of this, right back to that point at 58, he is removing the need for a definition from the existence of a "concept". To know what red is, or what a game is, does not require that one knows a definition. He is presenting the concept as something other than requiring a definition. Accordingly, I know what 'red' is if I can point to a red thing. And, he has completely separated this from "I know what red is if I can recite a definition of 'red'".
As expressed by my disagreement above, I am not yet convinced that this separation, and the way it's expressed at 58, is accurate. It is implied that if I can recite the definition of red, yet cannot point to a red thing, then I do not know what red is.
Quoting Luke
So what I am doing is attempting to understand what Wittgenstein is doing. When his way of doing things is inconsistent with, or clashes with, what is customary for me, then understanding what he is doing becomes difficult. This is where disagreement crops in, I want to go this way, as is my habit, and Witty says no, go that way.
Where does Wittgenstein speak of an "imaginary red"?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
As I explained in my previous post, and as is clear from the quote, he does not speak of imaginary colours:
If I speak of a white unicorn, that doesn't make the colour imaginary. Also, red is not an imaginary colour.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Probably because he is not talking about imaginary colours or how they exist. It is the coloured object which is imaginary (actually, "non-physical" is Wittgenstein's description).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What about all of Wittgenstein's talk of ostensive definition? How do you account for that? If I point at a red object to explain the meaning of the word "red", is that defining "red" into existence? Firstly, I didn't invent the word, so no. Secondly, our ability to sense and distinguish red as a colour is, for the majority of us, part of the human experience. I would have a hard time explaining the meaning of the word in this way if nobody else could distinguish the colour. Therefore, I wouldn't consider it entirely as "defining the colour into existence". Anyway, this seems to be taking us far from the text.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, he is pointing out that the concept of a game or a number (and probably many more concepts) is not "everywhere bounded by rules" (§68). The concept can be made more rigidly bounded or defined for some purpose if we desire, but it is otherwise not so exactingly defined (§69). However, this doesn't mean that (until we make the definition more exact) it is not defined, or that "he is removing the need for a definition".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
He is not "presenting the concept as something other than requiring a definition". An ostensive definition is also a definition. Are you suggesting that the only true definition is in (numerical) terms of wavelength, or what did you have in mind?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't see this as being expressed anywhere at §58.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A strange way to put it: "I do not know what red is". If you mean by this that you do not know some of the ways to use the word "red" (in this example), then that would be correct.
It's what you called "fictional", I called it "imaginary". Wittgenstein referred to it in this way: "'what has the colour' is not a physical object". When he says that there is something which has the colour red, but this thing is not a physical object, doesn't this imply "imaginary red" to you? Or do you hold a difference between a fictional object which is red, and an imaginary red? I think you're trying to make something out of nothing.
Quoting Luke
Of course he speaks of imaginary colours. Look at 56-57. He speaks of bringing the memory of the colour before "the mind's eye", and he even says the "memory-image". "And don't clutch at the idea of our always being able to bring red before our mind's eye even when there is nothing red any more."
If an image of red in the mind's eye is not an "imaginary colour", then what is? I'll tell you what is. We can create an "imaginary colour" by definition, as I described. Notice that these two senses of "imaginary colour" are quite distinct. That's my point.
Quoting Luke
I think you misunderstand. He clearly removes the need for a definition. Reread 68-69. He says that we can give a concept boundaries, close the frontier, but this is not necessary. It is done for a particular purpose. Nevertheless, for Wittgenstein this does not mean that there are not rules involved. What this means is that the rules at play here are other than definitions or boundaries. If we want to look for the rules involved with the concept of "game" we must look for something other than a definition or a boundary.
Quoting Luke
Hasn't he already rejected ostensive definition as insufficient for learning types? Didn't he demonstrate that we must already know how to distinguish types before ostensive definition can be successful? We don't learn concepts of types, like "game" through ostensive definition. There must be some other form of rule, other than a rule of definition, which is at play here.
His talk about the broom and the table in terms of some final analysis should be seen in light of his former thinking, as some of you have already pointed out. And isn't this our tendency, as philosophers especially, we seem to think that if we can get to the bottom of what is meant by this or that term or concept, then we have a more exact sense of meaning. It seems to be the case that the more exact we are with a word, for example games, the more inexact we become, i.e., we exclude many other uses of the word.
Wittgenstein still believes in the logic of language in the PI, but it's the logic of use, and not the a priori logic found in the Tractatus. The PI is more of an a posteriori investigation, or a pragmatic investigation of language usage. There is clarity in the PI, but it must be seen in terms of use and context, and one must be careful about being too dogmatic, and not to overgeneralize as is seen in many philosophical theories.
There is a difference between real horses and fictional horses. But is there a similar difference between real unicorns and fictional unicorns? No, because horses are real, whereas unicorns are not. You are conflating this distinction with your use of the term 'imaginary', only to muddy the waters. You have not yet named an imaginary (i.e. fictional) colour; you have only named the memory-image of a real colour. Besides, I fail to see what your talk of fictional colours has to do with the text.
Also, as I explained earlier, Wittgenstein does not preclude physical objects and is not speaking exclusively about non-physical objects at §58. Therefore, he is not talking about an "imaginary red". That is a very distorted reading and I think you are putting too much emphasis on the final sentences of this quite difficult section to be drawing any specific conclusions from it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
At §56-57, he raises the putative possibility that a memory-image could play the role of a paradigm or sample, but he raises this possibility only to reject it: "we do not always resort to what memory tells us as the verdict of the highest court of appeal" (§56) and "If we forget which colour this is the name of, the name loses its meaning for us; that is, we’re no longer able to play a particular language-game with it." (§57)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Where is your textual support for these claims?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Where does he do this? Again, support your claims with textual references.
Look, I'm not going to rehash everything that we've already gone over. Anyway, I would only be repeating the points that Fooloso4 made earlier. If his comments didn't convince you then I doubt that mine will either. Besides, I don't have the patience to try and correct what appears to me to be your deliberate misreadings. If you have textual support for your claims that are not blatantly taken out of context, then I look forward to seeing them. Otherwise, this is just derailing the discussion.
He's not saying that you can't learn how to use certain words by referring to things or objects. We teach children all the time by pointing to things (cups, houses, trees, etc). He's saying that meaning or sense is not derived in this way, i.e., not by pointing to some object. So, ostensive definition can be part of the learning process. Learning meaning or sense involves a wide variety of uses that may include pointing to this or that in social contexts, but is not dependent on this or that object.
I find the current sections so iconic that it is difficult to provide a summary and not to simply quote them in their entirety.
I largely agree with this, especially with §66 and §67, which are about as clear as Witty gets. So on to
§68:
The first thing that stands out about §68 is that it harkens back to an early early discussion back in §3, in which Witty was objecting to Augustine that his conception of language held true only for a "narrowly circumscribed area", and in fact then expressly invoked games as a further example. To recall:
§3: "It is as if someone were to say, “Playing a game consists in moving objects about on a surface according to certain rules...” - and we replied: You seem to be thinking of board-games, but they are not all the games there are. You can rectify your explanation by expressly restricting it to those games".
In §3 it might have seemed as though what was missing was a more complete or more general conception of a game. §68 in fact makes clear that this is not the case - the problem isn't that there ought to be a more complete conception of a game, but that no such complete or general conception could be forthcoming, even in principle. Instead, what can count as a game has, as it were, an indefinite extension, which can nevertheless be made provisionally definite by 'drawing a boundary'. Such a boundary will not exhaust what counts as a game, but will, like Augustine, 'circumscribe it' within a certain area.
One 'technical' note here is that §68 marks the reappearance of 'rules' as an object of discussion (they've been 'missing' since §54). With respect to them, the point made seems to be something like: rules function as constraints - they mark, like 'boundaries', lines beyond which one cannot go, without for all that exhausting the range of what can be done within a game. Hence: "No more are there any rules for how high one may throw the ball in tennis, or how hard, yet tennis is a game for all that, and has rules too."
This paragraph reminds me of the courts trying to come up with a definition of pornography. A definition should be seen more as a guide than some absolute measure of meaning. Although, many definitions try to show how a word is used in a variety of contexts. However, most people use the dictionary as some absolute arbiter, and in some sense it can be used as an arbiter. And although there are not always clear boundaries around the definition, as seen in W. idea of family resemblances, there are still uses of the word that fall outside normal usage. This in turn may give rise to the idea that there is some way of setting limits, or of being more exact in our talk of games. This desire is so powerful that even after understanding what W. is saying, we are still drawn to the idea that we can describe the game more precisely.
§68
It's interesting that even the concept number, which we tend to see as more rigid, is not necessarily bounded. It too can have uses that are unbounded, just as the concept game has unbounded uses.
The question is: Why does this trouble us? It seems to be our desire for exactness, but even the concepts of being exact or being precise is not subject to a strict boundary. So, it seems we are fooled into thinking a certain way due to our lack of understanding of just how language works. Hence, Wittgenstein's method of showing us the way out of this kind of thinking.
Finally, although there are rules that govern the uses of concepts, concepts are not everywhere bounded by rules. There seem to be just enough rules to allow us to say this or that is correct or incorrect, but also enough elasticity to leave room for expansion or growth in terms of what we say, and how we say it.
Well, the first part of 58 is where he lays out the conditions for the apparent "contradiction". At the end, he offers a resolution. So it's only natural that after understanding the conditions of the contradiction, I would focus on his proposed resolution.
Quoting Luke
I told you, read 68-69. "'"All right: the concept of number is defined for you as...' ---It need not be so.". Read this as not necessary. "For how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game and what no longer does? Can you give the boundary? No.You can draw one; for none has so far been drawn." It's all right there, a boundary or definition is not necessary. There is no need for a definition or boundary of the concept "game", yet the word still has meaning and is useful.
Quoting Sam26
Since meaning is use, then you would just contradict yourself if you said that we learn how to use words this way, but we don't learn their meaning in this way.
Quoting Sam26
Yes, of course ostensive definition is part of the learning process, but look at what he's focusing on in this section of the book, the capacity to recognize similarities, "family resemblances".
[quote=66]And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.[/quote]
What he's starting to focus on is this, the recognition of similarities. It's not the existence of similarities, but the recognition of similarities, and this is what he is pointing to as the fundamental aspect of conception. And, notice that he is deliberately separating this from what he seems to think is the faulty representation of conception, as the creation of a boundary or definition. You could say he is separating the material aspect, as the capacity to recognize similarities, from the formal aspect, as the existence of definitions and boundaries, and he is arguing that it is this material aspect which provides the basis for existence of a concept. The formal aspect is shown as not necessary.
Quoting StreetlightX
I believe there's a bit of a trick to understanding the use of "rules" here. His use of the term will take a sharp turn at 81, and this is a sort of preparatory usage at 68, so it might be good to read it a couple times.
The premise is, we cannot state the boundary to the concept "game". So the consequent proposition (I interpret the phrases within quotes as propositions to be analyzed) is "But then the use of the word is unregulated, the game we play with it is unregulated." The reply is that "It is not everywhere circumscribed by rules...". And this is how we play games, some activities within the game are regulated, others are not, as his example shows. Now, the concept "game" has been shown to be unbounded, but this does not force the conclusion that there are no rules. It just means that the rules which are there, are not such limits of boundary. What I intuit, is that if we want to find the rules which govern conception, we must release the notion that these rules are constraints such as boundaries, or limits of definition. So if we restrict our understanding of "rules", such that the rules of conception must be limits of definition, boundaries, we will never find the rules of conception.
It is not the logic of language but the logic of the language-game, different games different logics, that is to say, different grammars or rules.
Your point seems to be a distinction without a difference. When I speak of the logic of our language I'm talking about grammar, rules, use, and finally meaning or sense, which would obviously include how words and concepts are used in language, and thus language-games. This expression is used not only in the Tractatus, but in the PI (PI 93, 345,).
The difference is that W. had in his own words sublimed the logic of language in the Tractatus (PI §38, PI §89).
It is not just the relationship between logic and language that he comes to reject.
Logic, according to the Tractatus underlies and is the scaffolding of both language and the world.
In the PI logic is not prior to, independent of, or determinate for the language game.
I'm not saying that it's the same method or the same kind of logic. His understanding of the role of logic in language is much different in the PI.
Sorry, I missed the clarification you made between them:
Quoting Sam26
I still think it is important to emphasize that the rejection of Tractarian logic is as much a rejection of an ontology as it is a rejection of a view of language and the activity of analysis.
Yes, but it depends on what you mean by his ontology. If you mean his analysis of how propositions connect with the world, and the limits he puts on language, then I agree. Although, in the PI he still believes there are limits to what can be said, it's probably where I disagree with Wittgenstein.
It is not simply a matter of how propositions connect with the world but of the logical structure of the world from simple objects that make up the substance of the world (T 2.02 - 2.021) that combine in determinate logical ways to form the facts of the world (T 2.01).
I don't find anything to disagree with here, at least not in this statement. I'm very familiar with the Tractatus and what it says.
There is one that I am active in now. I would like to hear what you have to say. We have covered through 3 without getting bogged down in details but now the other participants are anxious to jump ahead. I am somewhat sympathetic but think there are still some issues that need to be discussed that will shed light on the later problems.
Nowhere does he say or even imply: 'There is no need for a definition or boundary of the concept "game"'.
Rules are boundaries. When the interlocutor suggests, as you do, that the use of the word or the 'game' we play with it is unregulated, Wittgenstein responds that it may not be everywhere circumscribed by rules, but this does not mean that it has no rules.
Yet at the same time Wittgenstein pointed out that the meaning of physical concepts such as optical red cannot be meaningfully said to transcend the holistic totality of one's experiences, due to the meaning of utterances resting upon use and demonstration.
So I understood Witty as rejecting the epistemologies of both phenomenalism and physicalism, whilst being close in spirit to metaphysical pluralism - not in the sense of substance pluralism but in the sense of use pluralism and family resemblance.
If you refuse to understand what is written, then I can't help you to see what you deny is there. But I'll try one more time. He starts 68 with a proposition. The concept of number is defined for you as ... such and such. He replies to this proposition with "It need not be so". He says he can give the word "number" rigid limits, (a rigidly limited concept), or he can use "number" in a way such that the extension of the concept is not closed by a frontier.
Do you understand that he is saying that he can use the word "number" in a way such that its meaning is not bounded by a definition? So he proceeds with "And this is how we do use the word 'game'." He is explicitly saying that we use the word "game" in this way, such that the extension of the concept is not bounded by a definition.
Quoting Luke
Not exactly, so consider that notion a misleading prejudice, and forget it. Here's the point. Boundaries are rules, but not all rules are boundaries. So he has excluded definitional boundaries as the type of rules which apply in the concept of "game". However this does not mean that the concept is unregulated. We can conclude that the concept is regulated in a different way, rules other than definitional boundaries are what govern the conception of "game".
If you look back to 66, you'll see that the concept "game" is described as a "complicated network
of similarities", which are characterized at 67 as "family resemblances". Do you see the difference between a network of similarities, and a boundary or a limit to this network? The network of similarities is necessary for the existence of a concept, a boundary to the network is not necessary.
§69 does some clarification work about the role of boundaries with respect to games (which we can also read as: 'rules with respect to language-games'). As with §68, the point is that the inability to exhaustively 'draw boundaries' around games is not some kind of incapacity or 'ignorance'. We are not failing at something that could, in principle be done - if only we were more intelligent, had better powers of conceptual discernment, etc etc. That we "can't tell other exactly what a game is ... is not ignorance".
And yet again, Witty iterates that this in turn does not mean that boundaries cannot be drawn: "we can draw a boundary - for a special purpose." - but we don't need such a boundary for us to understand what a game is - unless we have a 'special purpose' in mind for it: "Does it take this to make the concept usable? Not at all! Except perhaps for that special purpose". To summarize in point form:
(1) Games (and concepts/words) are not necessarily exhausted by their rules/boundaries.
(2) [Which means]: An inability to exhaustively define a game by means of rules/boundaries is not a deficiency on the part of us or the concept of games.
(3) Which doesn't mean we can't draw boundary if we want to for the sake of some purpose.
---
Since this is a small section, I wanna take the opportunity to go over the motivating context of these remarks. Specifically, it's important to keep in mind the discussion in §60-§64, about whether or not we should 'analyse' compound things into simple things. Recall there that while Witty said that lots of compound things (like broom) could be 'analyzed' into simple things, certain aspects of the compound could be lost in the analysis into simples. So we can't take for granted that the analysis of compounds into simples is guaranteed a priori as an unproblematic operation.
The questions dealt with here are of a similar problematic: can makes be 'analyzed' into their rules? Is there a straightforward, 1:1 correspondence between a game and rules/boundaries that 'compose' it? (just like: is there a straightforward, 1:1 correspondence between a compound and the simples that 'compose' it?). If the discussion of simples and complexes are anything to go by, the answer will be: not necessarily.
Hi sime. I had to replace your use of 'optical red' with 'the word "red"' to make sense of this. It was unclear to me which section you were referring to with your comments, or whether you were commenting on the text as a whole, but it sounds like a reasonable summary of PI 58. (I think!)
No, I don't see him saying that the concept has no definition whatsoever, as you claim; only that the concept is not everywhere circumscribed by rules. Therefore, this leaves some rules/boundaries/definition to the concept.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
For example?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What do you mean by "definitional boundary", and how is it different from a rule?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That's fine, except your claim was that no boundary or definition is required for the concept of a game whatsoever. This implies that the word, in this context (of "board-games, card-games, ball-games, athletic games, and so on"), can mean anything at all. But the word "game" (in this context) has a circumscribed meaning/definition/usage, even though it is not everywhere circumscribed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achilles
Whilst this is slightly jumping the gun, later on in PI Wittgenstein expresses a similar logical refutation of the idea that the use of language can be grounded in rule-based definitions or explicitly expressed conventions, because in a nutshell the very meaning of rules and conventions is grounded in their use! - For otherwise our definitions lead to infinite regress.
As an example, just try to define the logical operators non circularly.
Also, regarding the question of 'exactness' with respect to the specification of rules, Wittgenstein had questioned earlier in his career (i think during his middle period in Philosophical Grammar), whether the notions of exactness, identicalness etc were a priori in the sense of being phenomenological aspects of experience. The significance being whether or not exactness is empirically reducible. For if it isn't, then the notion of exactness is well, inexact, it's meaning only being demonstrable as a family resemblance of uses across different language-games.
Well, I don't see how you can miss it, because. he clearly states that a concept may be bounded by a definition but "it need not be so". Then, we can use the concept in a way so that it "is not closed by a frontier". And, the concept of "game" is like this. Further, at 69 he says of the concept "game", "We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn."
Quoting Luke
Look at 85, Wittgenstein compares a rule to a sign-post. A sign-post is not a boundary. They are fundamentally different. A sign-post encourages you to proceed, a boundary prevents you from proceeding.
Quoting Luke
Let's be clear, this is not my claim, it is Wittgenstein's claim. And, he's very explicit about this point. You ought not deny it, or you'll misunderstand what he's showing us.. I am still undecided as to whether I agree or not, I'll see where it leads. However, I see no reason to reject this claim, at this point. If this means that the word "game" can mean anything at all, then what's wrong with that? We are fundamentally free to use words however we please, This is very obvious with the youngsters who make up new uses for words every day.
Quoting Luke
Hold on, you've added an extra condition "in this context". The context acts as a boundary, it bounds the word, as a particular instance of use, therefore with a particular purpose. Notice that Wittgenstein says that the concept itself is unbounded, but it may be bounded for a particular purpose. So putting a word into a particular context is an instance of limiting the concept for a particular purpose.
I see a possible paradox here. We may draw a boundary for a special purpose. In this case the concept is being used for a specific purpose. However, Wittgenstein says that the concept is "usable" without such a boundary. As Luke points out, this would mean that there are no restrictions to the possible uses of any such concept. If this is the case then there is nothing which distinguishes one concept from another, each is infinitely usable. Each concept is usable in an infinite number of ways, having its use defined by the particular instance of usage.
The problem being that the usefulness of a tool is created by having a particular purpose for that tool, not by having an endless number of uses. Usefulness is created by conforming the tool to the specific use. A "tool" which has no particular use, like a piece of matter, may be infinitely usable, but it has little if any usefulness, and can't really be called "a tool". So we really need a distinction between "useful" and "usable" to bring the concept from the category of usable into the category of useful.
Recall Wittgenstein's analogy for verbal definitions in terms of occasional sign-posts that are placed to guide walkers along a route. The sign-posts tend to be laid down only at the points where they are useful, namely at the places where walkers frequently become lost or confused.
The route is analogous to the implicit conventional use of a word, whereas the sign-posts are analogous to the explicit conventional definition of the word. Needless to say, individual walkers will walk idiosyncratically , regardless of whatever the sign posts say.
And is it necessarily the case that a walker who frequently follows the route could give an accurate verbal account of it without him actually following it?
Isn't a word itself a sign?
Wittgenstein keeps saying the same things, only from different angles. It seems that philosophers and others get hung up on the form of the proposition/statement, as opposed to the function of the proposition/statement, word, or concept. Clarity of thought is not about some very precise definition, which as it turns out is generally impossible. This is clearly observed in our use of the word game, which doesn't have clearly defined borders. On the other hand, clearly defined borders may be drawn if we're talking about a particular kind of game, say chess. However, the tendency for philosophers is to look for unifying principles, or some theory that sums up the concept in some neatly defined idea.
As Wittgenstein points out, someone might say that before we come to understand these unifying principles or theories, we didn't have a very exact definition or an exact measure, but then the problem raises it's ugly head again, what do you mean by exact. So, the problem continues because we aren't seeing the social nature of language in the stream of life.
There are similarities in the Tractatus and the PI in that Wittgenstein is still trying to mark out the limits of sense. In the Tractatus he sets out the limit of language, but in the PI he speaks of the limits (plural) of language, which are found in how we use language. These limits (in the PI) are seen in the various uses of propositions, words, and concepts, they are open to view. They are not hidden, as in the Tractatus, but open to view in the stream of life.
Another similarity between the Tractatus and the PI, is that Wittgenstein is still trying to understand the function of language. In the PI there is no absolute method of determining sense from nonsense, no formal boundary as he set up in the Tractatus. Something only makes sense (in the PI), or is nonsense in a particular language-game. Even the term make sense is vague, just as the term game is vague. Just as the word game would alter its meaning from context to context, so making sense would alter its meaning from context to context, or from language-game to language-game.
This is an expanded version of PI 69, pulling together a general overview.
The point of this thread is to discuss and understand what Wittgenstein is saying in the text. Therefore, I'm not adding an "extra condition" by talking about context; this context has been created by what he is talking about in the text and, in particular, in the section of the text that we are currently discussing. I didn't make up these examples for context:
Likewise with numbers:
This is what Wittgenstein is talking about. So, if you take Wittgenstein to be saying here that the words "game" or "number" can mean anything at all, then you are misreading him.
§70 continues to emphasise how boundaries (read: rules) are inessential to the workings of concepts (to the concept of concepts, if you will). This is, as I mentioned earlier, analogous to the claim that the analysis of composites into simples is itself inessential for the composites to function as composites. In §70 this is cashed out in the claim that language works perfectly well without the need for definitions - hence the rhetorical question: "do you want to say that I don’t know what I’m talking about until I can give a definition of a plant?” (Witty's answer is clearly: “Obviously not”).
As usual however, Witty leaves space for boundaries to nonetheless have a place, where, in conceding to his imaginary interlocutor that the picture of the leaves is not ‘exact’, it is only not ‘exact’ in the particular sense that his interlocutor wants. Which means of course, that ‘exactness’ is only as specific as what is demanded of it. Which itself explains the closing of §69: "Though you still owe me a definition of exactness”.
§70 [Boxed Note]
The question sustained in this is something like: is the understanding of not-a-gambling-game ‘contained’ within the imperative to ‘show the children a game’? Or in other words: does the compound ‘show the children a game?’ ‘contain’ within it the simple ‘not a gambling game’? Or is there always an irreducible gap between the two, so the the complex cannot be so straightforwardly resolved into the simple. I’m not sure the question Witty asks here is really ‘meant’ to be answered - it’s meant to simply keep alive that dissonance between complex and simple.
—
I was going to write something about §71, but the whole thing is straightforward enough, so I’m going to skip it.
—
§72
§72 doesn’t so much make a point as set a scene for what’s to come: its a question of finding what is common (a color) in (1) A series of multicolored pictures; (2) Various shapes of the same color; (3) Various shades of blue. In all these cases, the question to keep in mind is something like: how does one pick out similarity among these difference cases of difference? Note also how the question of ostension is creeping its way back in here.
You're right, "game" has a context within Wittgenstein's use here. Therefore it is being used for a special purpose, and there is likely a boundary implied by that usage. That's why I see a probable paradox in what Witty is arguing. He's saying that the concept "game" has no boundary unless someone gives it a boundary by using it for a specific purpose. However, whenever the word "game" appears, it's an instance of someone using the concept for a specific purpose. So he's really created an imaginary, and most likely impossible situation (unless platonic realism is the case) , in which the concept "game" exists, but it is not being used by anyone for any specific purpose.
However, what I think is important in Wittgenstein's description, is that the boundary is created by the context of usage, (the purpose), it is not inherent within the concept. So instead of conceiving of a concept as something which necessarily has boundaries (boundaries are essential to a concept), we conceive of a concept as providing the possibility for boundaries. This puts concepts into a different category from boundaries.
What if someone happened to believe that Wittgenstein is the one making a mistake? Such a person might believe that boundaries are inherent within, and essential to any concept itself, rather than a product of how the concept is used for specific purposes. How would we ever determine which position is the correct one? Maybe if we proceed Wittgenstein will provide us with a demonstration to help us decide.
Wittgenstein is referring to the conventional use of the word, not to a special purpose use. ("To repeat, we can draw a boundary - for a special purpose.") The conventional use does not have a definite, precise or "rigid" boundary. ("For how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game, and what no longer does? Can you say where the boundaries are? No. You can draw some, for there aren’t any drawn yet.") But this is unproblematic. ("...this never bothered you before when you used the word “game”.")
Perhaps this is where our confusion started (mine as well as yours): you initially claimed that Wittgenstein was "removing the need for a definition from the existence of a concept". This may be seen as partly right, but only if we take "definition" to mean precise definition (which I wasn't). Because what Wittgenstein is saying is that an inexact, non-rigid, vague definition works just as well in many cases.
This relates to his comments in the following/concurrent sections relating to inexactness and vagueness, and his signalling that words/sentences do not require a precise meaning/definition to be useful (e.g. "stay roughly here"). A boundary can be given to a term to make it more precise ("for a special purpose"), but it is not required for the conventional use/usability of a term.
§69. W asks how we would explain to someone what a game is. He suggests we would describe games (maybe provide some examples) and then perhaps add "This [i]and similar things are called 'games'."[/i] The important point: it is not ignorance which prevents us from providing a precise definition or explanation; it is the vague nature of the concept itself. Again: "We don't know the boundaries because none have been drawn". "[W]e can draw a boundary - for a special purpose", but a boundary is not necessary to the use of the concept. Wittgenstein wryly adds that the same also applies to the concept of exactness, which itself remains vague unless we decide to define it more precisely for a special purpose: "you still owe me a definition of exactness".
No, he does not refer to "conventional use" nor does he distinguish an instance of special use from an ordinary instance of use. He says at 68 that there is no boundary, but that never troubled you before, when you used the word. Then he says that this does not mean that the use of the word is unregulated. Then at 69 he says this:
Clearly he is saying that the concept is usable without a boundary.Then he proceeds at 70 to explain the difference between describing something "roughly", and describing something "exactly". He is questioning whether an "exact" description is even possible.
So he never introduced the notion of "conventional use", as you are claiming. You are adding that, and it distorts what Wittgenstein has actually said. He has distinguished between having a boundary and not having a boundary. The boundary is produced when the word is used. Each instance of use being for a particular, or "special" (besondern) purpose.
Quoting Luke
He seems to be saying that an "exact" definition is impossible, but this just means that all definitions are to some extent vague or ambiguous. Wittgenstein is saying that the word "game" does not need any definition whatsoever to be usable. It receives its meaning (and therefore becomes definable) through use. In whatever way that you or I, or any other person uses the word, a definition might follow from the way that it was used, for that particular purpose.
Quoting Luke
So, what I think he is arguing now, in this section, is that all designated definitions, boundaries, and "places", are inexact, vague. You appear to think that he is categorizing and distinguishing between two types of definition, the precise and the vague. I see that he has already established his two categories as having a definition, and not having a definition, and now he is proceeding to argue that all instances of definition are to some extent ambiguous, vague and inexact.
Now your catching on.
It's not necessary.
Use for a particular purpose creates a boundary. If it's used for something other than a particular purpose, then I assume there would be no boundary created. But the next issue is whether there is exactitude or precision to such boundaries. And that reflects the unmentioned question of whether "special purpose" is something which has exact or precise boundaries.
The concept is being framed up as something having no particular boundaries, which can be made into something with particular boundaries, through the application of boundaries. The issue being that since its inherent nature is to be free of boundaries, the boundaries which are applied cannot obtain the status of precise, or exact, because that would create absolute restrictions, annihilating the concept as inherently unbounded. Consider that if the concept could be bounded in any absolute way, this would contradict its own nature, as being unbounded, leaving it no longer a concept. So the applied boundaries must still allow the concept some degree of unboundedness, in order to maintain the concept's nature as a concept (being inherently unbounded). Thus the boundaries are vague and inexact.
You claim that my talk of conventional use distorts the matter, but you fail to mention how. You say here that W distinguishes having and not having a boundary, that the "boundary is produced when the word is used" and that each instance of use is for a special purpose. Furthermore, in your previous post you read Wittgenstein as posing a paradox and to be saying that: "the concept "game" has no boundary unless someone gives it a boundary by using it for a specific purpose. However, whenever the word "game" appears, it's an instance of someone using the concept for a specific purpose."
Now, after I pointed out your error, you pretend that none of this was your position.
Sorry, but I just can't see your point. you appear to have gotten totally confused.
Quoting Luke
I said that I could see the likely possibility of a paradox ("probable paradox") involved with the position Wittgenstein is arguing. I did not say that I read Wittgenstein as posing a paradox. Perhaps this is why you appear so confused, you misunderstood, or didn't correctly read what I wrote.
Quoting Luke
What you call my "error" was based in your unwarranted introduction of the concept of "conventional use". Remove that assumption (that there is such a thing as "conventional use") because it is unsupported by the text, and the appearance of error disappears.
Quoting Luke
Once you remove this division, which you made rather than Wittgenstein, and recognize that every instance of usage is for a particular purpose, whether that purpose involves creating a definitional boundary or not, (such boundaries being unnecessary for use), then your claim that I made an error is unsupported.
This is clearly not what I was referring to as your "error". Your error was your repeated claim that a) use creates a boundary; and that b) instances of use are for a special purpose.
It may be helpful to think of the boundary as the limits of the concept; as those borderline cases where it is difficult to decide whether something falls under the concept or not, e.g. whether a hot dog is a sandwich. Wittgenstein says that we do not need to decide this boundary once and for all in order to use the concept. However, we can decide to draw a limit to the concept, if we choose to, for a special purpose. It is not an instance of use that draws this boundary, but our agreement in a particular instance or for a particular purpose to use the word in this special (more specific) way. Otherwise, there is no boundary to the concept and it will just have it's usual unbounded meaning.
There's no error,.it's clear from what Wittgenstein says. A boundary may be created in use for a special purpose. But it is not necessary to create such a boundary in instances of use. What I said, was that every instance of use is an instance of use for a particular purpose. However, it's not necessary that every instance of use for a particular, or "special" purpose, is an instance of creating a boundary.
Quoting Luke
Each instance of use is carried out by an individual. An individual person uses a word. A person may decide to create a boundary through definition of the term (as in a logical proposition). Agreement is irrelevant. Wittgenstein says nothing about agreement here.
W gives a scenario in which he is asked to "Show the children a game" and he teaches them a gambling game. The person giving the order complains that they didn't mean that sort of game. W asks whether the person must have had the exclusion of the gambling game in mind when they gave the order. This again demonstrates that there is no boundary to the concept prior to setting one for a special purpose, in which case the concept gets more specifically defined via its agreed upon use. It also touches on Wittgenstein's rejection of the notion that meaning is determined by the mind.
§71. Wittgenstein dismisses the idea that a concept "with blurred edges" is not useful (or not a concept), stating that it is often more useful than a concept with "sharp" edges.
W advises that he is not intending the person receiving the explanation to find the features common to all of the examples; commonalities that W was somehow unable to express. "Here giving examples is not an indirect way of explaining - in default of a better one." Giving a different type of explanation, such as a dictionary definition, could equally be misunderstood. But the giving of examples in this way is how we do commonly explain the meaning of words, including "game".
Just skimming through what has been written so far and I found this, which seems not to have been taken up on. I'm not a full blown 'therapeutic philosoper' by any means, but I completely agree that it would be totally missing the point if people did not apply what Wittgenstein is saying to their own thinking, including their understanding and interpretation of the text.
I suspect, from reading some of your interpretations thus far, that you may well have quite a different take on the implications of the PI for our own thinking than I do. As such I would be interested to read what your thoughts are on this.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/4917/is-cell-replacement-proof-that-our-cognitive-framework-is-fundamentally-metaphorical
Maybe an opportunity for @Banno to chime in.
I actually wanted to just post "meaning is use" in that thread but it would have come off as shitposting.
As we get further into how Wittgenstein describes what it means to follow a rule, you'll see that this is exactly what follows from his position. To act correctly is to be observed as following a rule. But there is no principle whereby we might judge which rule is the correct rule when two fundamental rules contradict. There is no principle whereby "correct" or "incorrect" might be judged of rules themselves, because this is judged in relation to rules. That is a problem which I believe I've brought to your attention before, (I know I've explained it to Luke). But supporters of Wittgenstein seem to always be insistent that it is not a real problem.
It's ultimately a moral issue, distinguishing right from wrong. Other metaphysics, like Plato's for example, turn to something further like "good", or religions turn to "God", as a principle to resolve the value of any particular rule. Then there are metaphysics which produce ideas like utilitarianism, and pragmatism. It's all somewhat arbitrary, so the issue is never really resolved whether you take Wittgenstein's position, another metaphysical position, or a religious position. So I think Witty's point just ends up being that it's a waste of time to look beyond "the rule" for the principle of right and wrong.
@Banno and @unenlightened what are your thoughts?
The way you talk about rules seems confusing to me.
I think Streetlight, Luke, Fooloso4, and myself are pretty close in our interpretation as far as I can tell, but your interpretation seems a bit off. Wittgenstein isn't exactly the easiest to interpret, but it's not beyond our reach either, at least generally.
On the whole I think the thread is going well. I hope we don't give up on it like so many other threads.
I have not given up but I don't have anything to add to the current sections and since I am a late comer don't want to push forward.
Instead of examining meaning, examine use.
I definitely would not equate the two, because what I'm saying goes way beyond what you're saying. Nevertheless it's an extrapolation of the same principle, some metaphysical implications.
Quoting Sam26
So far, Wittgenstein has not laid down the law, what exactly is a rule. Maybe that's why I am confused. Notice though, how he's described concepts, as unbounded, vague, even ambiguous. Maybe the meaning of "rule", being a concept, is like this. In that case you and I could each go in different directions of interpretation, while both following the same rule. What if a word itself, or a collection of words, is a rule? Then my interpretation is just as much following the rule as yours, or anyone else's is. And there is no correct interpretation, or correct way to follow a rule, only agreement and disagreement.
Quoting Sam26
I agree.
So all I'm saying Banno, is that examining use is not necessarily going to resolve the problem, again what if it's an incorrect use? I do agree that generally use gives us the correct sense or meaning, but can we say that dogmatically. Can every case of incorrect use be resolved using Wittgenstein's method? Would Wittgenstein himself say such a dogmatic thing? I'm not sure. I'd be interested in what you and others think.
I sometimes read this as providing a philosophical out from those torrid interminable discussions of the meaning of this or that term.
Yes, use is neither correct nor incorrect. It just is. In a nearby thread I am using "necessary" in terms of possible worlds, while @tim wood uses it in Kant's more conceptually enigmatic way. Neither is correct; but one way might lead to a simpler, less knotty outcome.
, I'm not looking for more places to enter discussion right now; quite the opposite. I find myself here when I should be doing other stuff. But I might take a look...
I've avoided this thread for that reason, and because of the presence of @Metaphysician Undercover, with whom I have some issues. Good to see Meta participating. Doubtless his eccentric approach will have folk re-thinking and re-enunciating things with care.
Quoting Sam26
Of course we can't know that; what we can look for are places where distinct uses are thought to be the same - "does nothing exist", for instance; or where use in one area is taken to contradict use in another - free will and physical determinism, for instance.
Thanks for the encouragement Banno. I'll try to keep on track of the thread, I promise.
I assume that at 71, he's leading up to his discussion of definition at 72-73. What do you think he's saying with the analogy of "stand roughly there"? Is he saying that a definition need not be exact? You still know where to stand even though he has not told you exactly where to stand. Does "roughly there" signify a bounded area, without boundaries? Wouldn't that be contradictory? To avoid contradiction, which do you think it signifies, a bounded area, or not?
The first example contains various multicoloured pictures in which one of the colours is yellow ochre. Wittgenstein tells the student that the common colour in all of these examples is 'yellow ochre'. Note that Wittgenstein gives an account of the odd type of "explanation" he will provide here: "an explanation that another person will come to understand by looking for, and seeing, what is common to the pictures. Then he can look at, can point to, the common feature."
The second example contains figures of different shapes which are all painted the same colour. Wittgenstein again tells the student that the common colour in all of these examples is 'yellow ochre'.
The third example contains samples of different shades of blue. Wittgenstein tells the student that the common colour in all of these examples is ("what I call") 'blue'.
I take it that the student does not know in advance the names of the colours, and that he is being taught to identify them via Wittgenstein's "explanation" of seeing what is in common. I use scare quotes here because Wittgenstein "explains" only that there is a common colour and then assumes the other person will find it themselves without any further instruction. Note that in the 'blue' example, there are no two identical colour samples - therefore, what commonality is the student supposed to find by sight alone?
What do you mean by "properly determined"?
I think that would be an excellent idea. The way I read PI is rather like a geologist taking temperature readings from inside a volcano and finding that they do not match the account of volcanology currently being used to provide warnings to the small town at its foot.
The temperature readings themselves (the account of language use in the first section) is meant to be rather mundane, not something anyone should have much trouble agreeing with. I don't think Wittgenstein intended to be saying anything too controversial by pointing out that the grocer does not consult a colour chart, or that we would not play poker when told to "show the children a game", or that we can understand the instruction "stand roughly there". What is controversial is that this mundane understanding of the way language works is not in accord with the way it is treated in Philosophy.
So yes, I do get a bit frustrated at what I see as a long discussion about how thermometers work (to return to my metaphor) when I don't see anything there that any rational person could disagree with. 72, where we're currently at, is a classic example. @Luke has just accurately laid out what Wittgenstein means by this example, but what is there to disagree with about it? I mean what possible other way could any intelligent person think about such cases?
The trouble is that Wittgenstein is also not extracting a set of rules for how to do philosophy. Thus it's very hard in an abstract manner to say "... and this is what Wittgenstein means us to take from this example" and proceed to provide a neat list of methodological consequences. It's a marshalling of facts to help find our way around whatever philosophical problems we may be stuck in.
Anyway, rambling and probably unwanted rant aside, I mean to simply say that I think what you suggest is a good idea.
Regarding it, I think that Banno has already hinted at what I would say. The 'person' in a biological sense, might well be the collection of cells, but the confusion which arises from taking a discovery which applies to the 'person' in that context and applying it to the 'person' in a completely different context can be resolved by recognising that this is simply not what we mean by 'person' here.
I also think that Wittgenstein's reminders about how we talk about names can be helpful here. When we say "John is..." what we mean by 'John' is no single thing, but rather a collection of props such that if only one of them is taken away (the majority of John's cells) we have no problem remaining clear about to whom we refer.
Not at all, why would you think that? I'm only expressing my personal view of a useful/interesting interpretation exercise in the light of StreetlightX's suggestion. I think your exegesis is very accurate in its rephrasing of the examples Wittgenstein gives, and anyone struggling to understand the example may find your phrasing more approachable than Wittgenstein's, but I don't think many scholars consider the meaning of 72 to be that we should now have a clearer understanding of how humans learn colours as a result of Wittgenstein's investigation. It's not a developmental psychology textbook.
I think we're supposed to already know how humans learn colours (in a vague sense). As I said, what other understanding of the subject in 72 could any intelligent person have? Wittgenstein is drawing our attention to that which we should already know to show how this knowledge is being ignored in philosophical puzzles, how the move to universalism is belied by what we already know to be the case if we only stop to think about it.
As to the point of the discussion being in the title, the title is '... reading it together'. I'm not sure that really implies anything particularly restrictive about what we should discuss other than that it should have something to do with the book.
I got that impression from your expressed dissatisfaction with the point of this discussion on several occasions throughout the thread, including when you referred to it as "onanistic scholasticism" and told us it wasn't for you. Then, in your previous post, you singled me out as an example of how, in your opinion, this type of section-by-section exegesis we've been doing is not worthwhile. You know, you could always just start another discussion...
I'm not denying that's my opinion. I'm questioning why that would make you feel obliged to stop posting (or that I should start another thread for that matter). Are we not allowed differences of opinion on the matter, even robust ones?
But Wittgenstein lays out little problems, in almost every section, one after the other, and often suggests resolutions. And there is a problem at 72, which Luke exposes very nicely. The first two examples have the very same colour called "yellow ochre". The last example has different colours, with the same name "blue". So what he is demonstrating is that this is not the way that we learn colours, because we learn to apply the same names, "blue" for example, to distinctly different shades of colour. It is not a case of learning what the things have in common, that's the point here.
Look what he says at 73 when he talks about comparing colours to those on a table. He says "this comparison may mislead in many ways". The problem being that the one word, "blue" refers to many different shades of colour. "Which shade is the 'sample in my mind' of the colour green—the sample of what is common to all shades of green?" And he introduces "shape" to the problem as well, to demonstrate that the issue is complex. We are not only talking about things with different colours, but different shapes and different colours. He suggested that it is possible that there are "general samples", "schema", but asks how we would recognize it as a general example rather than as a particular instance. The suggested answer is that "this in turn resides in the way the samples are used."
So he has laid out a problem at 72. How do we learn to apply the same word "blue" to multiple different shades of colour? It cannot be a case of pointing to different samples and seeing what they have in common, like the ochre-yellow, because they do not have a common colour. So he suggests that it is in "the way the samples are used". Then proceeding to 74, he begins to discuss the difference between seeing a sample as a sample in a "general" way, and seeing the sample in a "particular" way.
But who thought we did learn colours like that. Did you? It's not a puzzle in the least... unless you are looking for a general rule, which is exactly the sort of philosophical muddle Wittgenstein is trying to resolve. Look at 74 where Wittgenstein explains that, of course people can get the meaning of the shape of a leaf as a sample, as opposed to the shape of a leaf as a particular. We have no trouble with this, nor would anyone describing our actions literally in this case describe them otherwise. The only problem here is the tendency in philosophy to try nonetheless to lever our experience into a straightjacket of some universal theory. The revelation is not that we treat things this way, it's that we should ever try to devise theories which presume we do not.
Personally, I never gave it any thought, so this is all new to me. As far as I know, maybe that's what people thought.
Quoting Isaac
It's clearly a puzzle, if you want to know how people learn colours, unless you already know how people learn colours, which I do not.
Quoting Isaac
How are you going to know how people learn colours, unless you know it as a general rule? If every individual learns colours in a different, and unique way, then there is no such thing as "how people learn colours". But then we could not say that people know their colours, unless it were somehow innate. Since Wittgenstein is clearly interested in how people learn colours, then its absolutely false to say that he is trying to avoid the philosophical muddle of the general rule. The "general rule" which is the product of inductive reasoning, and fundamental to description, is exactly what Wittgenstein is interested in.
Quoting Isaac
What do you mean "we have no trouble with this"? That's exactly what Wittgenstein is demonstrating, the trouble with this. All you are doing is claiming "I have no problem distinguishing blue from green, so why are you making an issue out of this?" But where does the "we" come from in "we have no trouble with this", when someone else is showing the trouble with it?
If you want to know how people learn colours then you'd be well advised to simply observe people learning colours. It's an empirical investigation, it can't be carried out from the armchair.
"The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long."
In 90-93 Wittgenstein lays out fairly clearly the
that this is not an empirical investigation, that we do not 'discover' new facts hidden behind the analysis.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
By describing the ways people learn colours. Again, we're not conducting an empirical investigation. We're marshaling that which we already know so as not to be taken in by philosophical puzzles which are just the result of a desire to universalise or in some other way ignore context.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I mean we deal with the situation quite comfortably all the time. It serves no purpose to say "there's something queer going on here" when doing it is the simplest thing, all we're having trouble with is saying what it is that we're doing, and that is a pseudo problem, it may just not be sayable.
But this is clearly incorrect, and that's the problem. There are relevant factors, innate within the human mind, things we're born with, instinctual, which cannot be observed. Therefore, if we wish to understand how people learn colours, we must take the observations, reason out what is missing from the observations, which is still necessary for the learning process, and this we can posit as the innate, or instinctual factors. So what is required is a very thorough analysis of the various factors, and this is what Wittgenstein is trying to give us. Allowing any faulty assumptions will throw the whole investigation askew.
Here's an example. Let's assume that we naturally, instinctually, distinguish different shades of colour. Now we have a whole range of different shades. But we have some shades which we call "blue" and some shades which we call "green". You might conclude that we draw an arbitrary boundary, these shades are blue, those shades are green, with some sort of boundary between. However, then we would have the problem which Sam26 referred to, some shades one group of people would call blue, while another group might call green, because the boundary is arbitrary, and there's really no way to say that one group is right and the other wrong.
But what if the original assumption is wrong? What if we do not instinctually notice different shades, what if what we instinctually notice is that some shades appear to be the same? So, for example, I notice one shade, and later a slightly different shade, but I recognize them as the same. I call them both "blue" because I see them as the same, though they are really different. If this is the case, then the "boundary" is created in a completely different way from the way described above. The boundary is not an arbitrary division between a range of different shades, the boundary is the limits to what we perceive as the same.
The two assumptions in the example are opposed. One assumes that what we instinctually notice is differences, the other assumes that what we instinctually notice is things being the same. Whichever assumption you go by, completely changes your perspective on boundaries, in relation to the opposing assumption. In reality, it's probably very complex, we instinctually notice both. But if some of us notice one more than the other, or notice sameness in some categories,, and difference in others, then the way that we relate to the different boundaries is going to be very different from one person to the next.
Quoting Isaac
It's not a pseudo problem. How and why we respect, and disrespect, boundaries, is a very real issue. As I indicated to Sam26, the issue goes far beyond the rules of language.
Because what I and several others have happily been doing on this thread for the past 28 pages is what you want to change. I take it that you want me to stop posting because I've mainly been doing the type of explication that you want to end.
On the other hand, a new discussion would give you the chance to discuss exactly what you'd like to discuss, and we could continue this one without you trying to dictate a change.
Not agreeing with it and wanting it to change are two entirely different things. I'm perfectly glad you've had a good time doing what you've been doing. You crack on. It's often something I personally find quite annoying, but that's OK because I'm not compelled to read it. I might well voice an opinion on it, if I think it's relevant, which, given that the book we're reading is basically about metaphilosophy, I think it is. But luckily you're not compelled to read that either.
I only made a couple of posts because Sam and StreetlightX made a couple of comments I found interesting. If they go nowhere, I'll duck out again and you can get back to your work of saying what Wittgenstein said but in slightly different words.
So you don't want it to change?
Quoting Isaac
Personally, I find that attempting to summarise what I think Wittgenstein is saying in each section gives me a better understanding of the text. I could probably do that on my own, but I doubt that I would have the same motivation to do so if I wasn't reading/summarising the work along with others. I'm also interested in finding points of disagreement, and discovering other's views on things that I might not have thought about myself.
If I said "stand there", I would be referring to the particular spot that I want you to stand at, because that's the nature of standing, to be at a particular spot, standing. We are always standing at a spot, not at an area, so that's what "stand there" refers to, a spot, not an area. If I add "roughly", to say "stand roughly there", it does not change the meaning of "stand there" such that I am now telling you to stand at an area rather than at a spot, it just means that I am not fussy about the particular spot where you stand, and therefore I have not bothered to properly determine the precise spot where I want you to stand. That's what I mean by "properly determined". "Stand roughly there" refers to a spot where you will stand if you carry out that instruction, but I have not properly determined that spot, leaving you a multitude of possible spots where you could stand and still be said to have carried out the instruction..
This is similar to the person who gives the order to Wittgenstein to teach the children a game - they do not "properly determine" or draw a boundary around what type of game to teach the children at first (i.e. they do not tell him to exclude gambilng games), but this does not change the meaning of "game". In your words, it just means they are "not fussy about the particular" game. The further instruction not to teach them a gambling game acts as a rigid boundary, or a more specific definition, for this special purpose.
So what? I have some spare time. I find the book extremely interesting. And I like to be an active participant in discussing it.
Quoting Luke
I think I see your point, but isn't it kind of an inverted version. In the one case, "teach the children a game" is wide open, unbounded, referring to anything which could be construed as a game, until it's restricted by "anything except gambling". In the other case, "stand there" is completely restricted to the precise point where I want you to stand at, until it is unrestricted by adding "roughly". In the one case the qualification "except gambling" is used to restrict, and in the other case the qualification "roughly" is used to release a restriction already implied.
Likewise, "stand roughly there" is wide open, unbounded, referring to anything which could be construed as (roughly) "there", until it gets restricted by (a more specific) there.
Returning to your question at the top of the page, there is no contradiction in giving the order "stand roughly there"; this does not signify both a bounded and unbounded area. As I stated earlier, it has some definition even though it is not "everywhere" defined. The use of the word "there" in this example is not completely without definition. Maybe think of it as a comparison between a loosely bounded and a more definitely bounded area, or perhaps an area of "blurred edges" vs. an area of "sharp edges".
I don't think "stand roughly there" refers to an area at all. It refers to a spot, "there", the spot where I want you to stand. But the speaker who says that, has improperly determined the spot by saying "roughly", thereby allowing many possible spots. For the reasons I have given.
If they cannot be observed (nor their consequences) then how can you know this? You're begging the question by presuming we're born with some instinctual understanding and so not being satisfied until you have found it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And how do you know they are faulty. What test are you applying here?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't even know what this means, but I'm presuming for the time being that you mean we have the biological equipment to provide our brain with such distinctions of hue and luminescence.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Why on earth is this a problem? What aspects of human life has been so manifestly spoiled by the fact that not everyone agrees where blue ends and green starts?
I really don't understand the rest of your post I'm afraid. It seems to be speculating about the different ways we might perceive colour. I can recommend a number of textbooks which go into the ocular mechanisms and how they work if you're interested, but I'm not sure how you think you might resolve such a question just by thinking about it.
Yes, only the only people who have recently presented views on the meaning of the text outside of the standard Hacker interpretation you're using have been either instructed to go and start another thread elsewhere or basically dismissed as 'wrong' and 'misreading', so I'm struggling to understand exactly what level of "points of disagreement" and "other views on things" you'd like to see as part of this thread. I'm sure there's some level there that you'd find amenable, but at the moment it just reads like a group of people all collectively paraphrasing Hacker and a couple of peripheral comments to the contrary being roundly ignored, scolded for their 'wrongness' or told to go elsewhere. I'm not seeing the interest in different views you're referring to.
Yes, it is rather frustrating, but to be fair he's the only one engaging in a discussion so it's hardly surprising is it?
I mean, there's only four basic ways to interpret the PI - doctrinal (which is basically MU's approach, though I've never heard such an extreme version of it before), elucidatory (which the bulk of commentators already seem to agree on - great, but then there's little to discuss), therapeutic (I prefer methodological, but 'therapeutic' seems to be the term most understood), or just plain wrong (as in Wittgenstein literally did not say that).
Unless there's going to be some entertainment of the alternative interpretations, or perhaps applications of the elucidatory approach, there's not going to be that much to actually discuss is there? If you take away the argument with MU, all you have left is a paraphrasing of Hacker and a couple of stray esoteric comments trying to widen the discussion which go nowhere because no one responds to them.
I think the problem is we've got a thread made up of three teachers and no students. This is a public forum made up of literally anyone in the world. We've done well to limit the topic to philosophy (the forum), and then a particular book (the PI). I think if you also want to narrow that down further to the exact type of discussion you have in mind, you may well be asking the impossible.
I didn't say their consequences cannot be observed, clearly they are, as the person learns. Learning is the consequence. To deny that there are instinctual factors involved in learning would be ridiculous. Could you teach a rock? Even if you consider the way that an AI computer learns, that computer must be pre-configured in a very specific way to be able to learn. To dismiss the instinctual factors involved in learning, as irrelevant to the process of learning, would be completely ridiculous. Call that "begging the question" if you like, but if it comes down to having to justify what is extremely obvious, I'd prefer to just beg the question.
Quoting Isaac
The test is analysis, that's the purpose of the thorough analysis in Wittgenstein's process, which you are wont to ignore. The analysis is to root out any faulty assumptions. If you simply believe that there are no faulty assumptions in this field, or that if there are any, we will never be able to identify them, then sure, the analytical process appears meaningless to you.
But you seem to hold the obviously faulty assumption that instinctual factors are not relevant to the learning process. And since these factors are not in themselves observable, only effects of them are observable in confluence with the observable aspects of the learning process, there are many other faulty assumptions which people hold, concerning the instinctual factors of the learning process. One such faulty assumption, is that we, as human beings, all instinctually "see things" in the same way. Read 74 closely, and don't simply ignore that fact, or dismiss it as irrelevant.
Quoting Isaac
As I told Sam, distinguishing correct from incorrect is a moral issue; "moral" being defined as concerned with the distinction between right and wrong. If we as human beings, cannot even find a way to agree on the simple question of the boundary between blue and green, how do you think we could find a way to agree on more important moral issues, which hold things that we believe to be important, at stake?
Quoting Isaac
Spoken in true hypocrisy, from the person who says that the general rule, and universalization, are what Wittgenstein wants us to avoid.
If one reads the text based on some theory of how it is to be interpreted then what one will see is not the PI but another text: “The PI According to X”. This is a problem that is more prevalent in academia then one might think. One does not read Plato or Aristotle but Plato or Aristotle according to X. In many cases the author is not even read and questionable claims repeated from one generation to the next. The secondary literature takes on a life of its own. The primary source is relegated to secondary status as the focus shifts from Wittgenstein to what X and Y have said about Wittgenstein.
As far as I am concerned there is only one way to interpret a text, any text, and that is by a careful and persistent effort to understand what the author is saying. Others who are more familiar with the text may be helpful, but it should never be too far from mind that they may simply be wrong.
From the preface:
Nice sentiment but I'm afraid decades of teaching have made me much too cynical to believe it. Everyone reads every text looking to find support for the thing they already believe to be the case at the outset. The interesting thing happens when students who hold themselves to relatively high standards read a text with this intention and find it so overwhelmingly and convincingly contradictory that they adopt, at least in part, the new approach. I think this is what happened for a time with the PI, but it didn't last. Now just about every group of philosophers wants to claim Wittgenstein as their own.
Quoting Fooloso4
This seems to directly contradict the quote you placed beneath it. What Wittgenstein is really saying is far less important than that which what you think he's saying has made you think.
The way I was trained and the way I taught was via primary texts. This approach does not appeal to everyone. It is difficult and slow going. It too has its limits. We are all in need of good teachers, ones who can teach us how to read, how to interpret, how to connect the dots and read between the lines. It is both analytic and synthetic. This, in my opinion, should be the role of secondary materials. At each step they return us to the text, to what is said here and here and here, how they go together or seem to contradict each other, and how the can be reconciled, how together they help shed light on the whole.
Quoting Isaac
Of course we do not approach a text without presuppositions, but that does not mean that everyone reads in order to find support for what they believe. If I believe that an author has something to teach me then I am not looking for confirmation but open myself to disruption. This is something that I learned at the beginning reading one of Plato’s dialogues. I thought that if I were there I could win the argument. But I soon found that my beliefs were not as obviously true or defensible as I had assumed. None of this would have happened if instead of reading Plato I was reading about Plato.
Quoting Isaac
The quote:
Interpretative reading is a mode of thinking. If I am to understand him I must think along with him. Again, this is not something one would learn from a reliance on secondary sources that provide ready made conclusions that spare you the trouble of thinking. It is not information gathering. It is wrestling with the text - Why would he say this? Is this what he means? What support can I find that this is what he means? Does that seem right? What has led him to say that? What support does he offer? How does this all fit together and what light does this provide for the whole?
While it sometimes happens that something an author says stimulates thoughts that go in a direction different than the author’s, it can also be the case that that direction is one the author is attempting to steer you away from. In my opinion, if an author is worth reading carefully then what he is really saying is far more important than what it is that I think he's saying. We can, however, never be certain that we have got it right. What he has made me think may or may not be important, but I think that too many of us too often put far too great importance on what we think. This is something that W.’s mirror is intended to help us see. Socrates’ maieutics helped his interlocutors deliver their windeggs, but they often valued them none the less because they were their own.
Another one of your faulty assumptions. You should take heed of what you claim is Wittgenstein's purpose, and quit with the pathetic generalizations.
And how do we know they are 'good' in the absence of having what they say concur with what we already believe (or arrive somewhere we unexpectedly find ourselves comforted by)? What other measure would you use, surely not something as vacuous as 'truth'?
Quoting Fooloso4
So if you don't approach a text with such expectations as I describe, what justification do you have for the belief that an author has something to teach you? Do you think that justification lies outside of your expectations and biases?
Quoting Fooloso4
How did you 'find' this? What sensation caused you to doubt your original beliefs, not their lack of concordance with 'truth' surely (not in Plato at least), for if you already knew what 'truth' was so as to be able to make the comparison you would not have needed to read Plato.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes, but it is a mode of historical thinking, biographical thinking, not necessarily philosophical thinking. Is this what he means? - how could you ever possibly know and what philosophical difference would the answer make? What support can I find that this is what he means? - again, what philosophical difference would it make if you could not. Is Kripke's obviously faulty paraphrasing any less philosophy for the fact that he misrepresented Wittgenstein? Does that seem right? - again, what possible measure could you use to answer this question, how would you tell the difference between an understanding which was accurate but of flawed philosophy, and an understanding which was inaccurate?
If you give even a cursory glance over the secondary literature, you will see that intelligent, well-respected academics have been able to answer all of your questions in just about every conceivable way and virtually none of them agree, leaving you free to choose whichever answer satisfies you. So what are you going to base that choice on if not your existing beliefs?
Quoting Fooloso4
Again, I would ask you how you are making the judgement that the author is worth reading outside of your pre-existing beliefs about what is of value?
I'm not suggesting in any sense that students should rely on secondary texts. In fact, I'd probably advise the opposite, but only so that they can interrogate the primary text, put it to use, see how their philosophical problems look through its lens, not to just dryly try to derive that which has already been derived. We teach our children calculus so that they can apply it, we don't get them to work it out themselves from scratch.
It was rhetoric... Oh and I should have added those who read so that they can sound supercilious when talking about related subjects, I forgot about them.
Does no one ever read to learn something in your reality?
In philosophy? What would they be learning, and how would they be sure they had learnt it?
The fact that you are never sure that you learnt it, is the reason why you keep reading more.
I'm not following your reasoning here, why would never being sure you learnt it advise reading more? In hope some surity might one day come, perhaps? I can perhaps see that in some defined topic with widespread agreement. If I didn't get maths I might well simply continue reading in the hope that one day I get what everyone else seems to have got. But what is it that everyone seems to have got in philosophy? I've reached just about the highest level of 'state-approved' learning it's possible to reach. I'm not sure I've 'got' anything at all.
You name me a conceivable position one could hold with respect to the current text and I'll find you a professional published philosopher who holds that view. To be honest, the view you personally seem to hold would be about the hardest, Norman Malcom perhaps is closest.
The point is it seems to be a quest which the very nature of it admits will never be fulfilled.
Consider what Wittgenstein says here:
How would you relate to this? How does Wittgenstein propose to separate "ideal" from "perfect?
I would say, that judging by your paragraph above, you would read something, have a vague understanding, despite the possibility of some misunderstanding, and accept your reading as sufficient. Would you call it perfect? Myself, if I was interested in the subject, I would not be satisfied with a vague understanding with some degree of misunderstanding. That would be an imperfection in my understanding. If the subject interested me, I would reread the text to get a better understanding of it, or proceed to read something else relevant to help me out. It's just a matter of approach, some of us actually are "striving after an ideal", that's just what is instinctual to us, while others are not. But it is the nature of "the ideal" which is tricky. So long as we recognize that "the ideal" is by its very nature impossible to achieve, then we are never frustrated by the reality that we never obtain the ideal, despite the fact that we are striving for it, and therefore we continue to better our understanding through this striving for the ideal.
Quoting Isaac
I've read the book before, much of it more than once, and have not formed a firm "position". That is because far too much of it is difficult to understand, and I never took the time to understand each passage. I reread sometimes as I read, and upon reading the book I had respect for the fact that I still
didn't understand much of it, and so I continued to reread some passages. That's why I am really enjoying the exercise of this thread. Maybe by the end of this I will be able to hold a position.
Quoting Isaac
Exactly, that's the nature of "the ideal". Do you know the saying "practise makes perfect"? We practise with the goal of getting better. It's not really the goal of perfection, because we respect the fact that perfection is impossible. So let's remove 'the ideal", because it's not real, it's not at all practical. But then what direction is "better"? There is no such thing as better now, and where we are is perfect.
By that measure a good teacher is one who panders. Why should a teacher concur with what we already believe unless what we already believe is unquestionably correct? To arrive somewhere we unexpectedly find ourselves comforted by is to go nowhere. A philosophical education is not about being comforted, it is about having the rug pulled out from underneath you. It is about being disoriented and lost. Wittgenstein said:
When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there. (CV 65)
Socrates was called a torpedo fish because he left his interlocutors numb and confused. Plato’s ascent from the cave was painful and contrary to the desire to crawl back into the comfort of the darkness of the cave.
Under the guidance of a good teacher the text opens up. We begin to see things in it that we had overlooked. The text becomes more cohesive. Passages we could not understand now make sense. But a good teacher is also one who teaches us not to rely on her.
Quoting Isaac
You open the book and begin reading it. Perhaps you are not ready for it and put it aside. Perhaps you think that since the author is held in such high regard that you should make the effort to work through it. Perhaps your work pays off, perhaps it doesn’t.
Quoting Isaac
It was not a sensation. I found what I thought were weaknesses and began to pull the argument apart only to find out that it was not as weak as I had assumed. I thought of counterarguments and found that they did not hold up against what he was saying. In short, he won the imagined argument every time. I came to question my assumption that some guy who lived in ancient times could not know more than someone living today. I came to question my assumption that I saw things as they are.
Quoting Isaac
For me it is neither historical nor biographical. It is a direct engagement with the text itself. At some point historical and biographical background may be helpful, but it may also be misleading. A first rate philosopher is not a product of history, he makes history.
Quoting Isaac
If he misrepresents W. then he will not be useful if my goal is to understand W. He may have something of value to say - some here evidently believe he does. The point of this topic is to understand the PI. If the text leads you to your own thoughts then that is all well and good, but it does not help us understand W.
Quoting Isaac
It is because there is so little agreement that I became interested in W. What I base my choice on is what seems to me to be most faithful to the text itself.
Quoting Isaac
The judgment that an author is worth reading is something that may evolve as I spend time reading the author. I may be drawn in or I may lose interest. Perhaps it is the fact that the author challenges my beliefs and values that I interesting. Perhaps it is the author’s way of looking at things that I find interesting. Perhaps it is the author’s ability to change my mind that I find most compelling.
If you want to defer to the secondary literature that is your choice, but some of us prefer to work through the text itself.
I am going to hold off going further with this because it will only take us further from the PI.
Yes. That is what I think Wittgenstein is saying. Not just in those paragraphs, but in his dismissal of the heirachy of analycity, his treatment of exactness, his talk of signs, basically half the book so far has been trying to get us to see that there is not an ideal, no universal frame, no perfect correspondence. Ramsey does the same, in his own way, and I'd certainly recommend reading his notes sometime, if you're interested. The "vague understanding" I might get from my reading is not made less vague by analysis, analysis provides only alternative information. I cannot somehow 'find' behind the text, the meaning, simply by looking hard enough. It must be shown, one must wrestle with actual philosophical problems, one must 'see' what Wittgenstein means, but to think you can then put that understanding back into language for others to learn from is to misunderstand what Wittgenstein is trying to show.
No problem, we're obviously worlds apart on this because I think this is exactly what the PI is all about. To bring it back to the text (as you seem to not see the thematic link), I'm referring particularly to section 90 where he talks (using Augustine's example investigations) about how we feel as though our philosophical critique must penetrate a phenomena, yet our confusion is dissolved by realising that this is not what we are doing at all. What we are doing something far more vague, we are only exploring the possibilities of phenomena, the kinds of things we say.
So yeah, if you think it's nothing but a distracting sideline, I can't see us finding much common ground from there.
In order to see what various things have in common requires making distinctions and disregarding all other features.
Note that viewing it in such cases it an activity, a way of using it.
Seeing it this way or that. In the Tractatus (5.5423) he gives us two ways of looking at the two dimensional drawing of a cube. We can deliberately see something this way or that. But it is not always deliberate. In some cases looking at it this way rather than that may be wrong, as in the example of when you want someone to bring you a cube, but in other cases it may allow you to see things and thus regard things in a new way, leading to some insight. In addition, there is no hard line between viewing objects and viewing situations.
This can be seen in the following comment from W.:
Seeing what things have in common is not a matter of making distinctions though. It is a matter of seeing different things as the same, seeing all the different shades of blue, as the same colour, blue. So it is somewhat opposed to making distinctions, it is overlooking differences, to say that different things are the same.
It is relevant to the different ways that we can see things. One might see all the different shades of blue as different colours, or one might see them all as the same colour, blue.
Quoting Fooloso4
Quoting Fooloso4
Quoting Fooloso4
Right, so all these descriptions of what 'seeing' really is are perfectly reasonable, but all you've done here is paraphrase them. Yes, things can be seen one way or another, who on earth thought they couldn't? Yes, sometimes seeing things one way can cause problems when you act on that conception, other times it can be quite useful. Again who on earth ever thought that this was not the case? Remember, Wittgenstein is speaking to an audience of highly educated philosophers.
You obviously have to don't really think that someone widely credited with being one of the greatest philosophers who have ever lived is thus acclaimed because he provided us with such banal insights as the fact that we sometimes see things one way and sometimes another?
So what do you think Wittgenstein is trying to show with respect to the theme of the book? Where do you think this discussion of 'seeing' is leading? Why bring it up now? What does Wittgenstein want us to do with it?
I would say that he is leading to 75 from 74. Or else we could accuse him of being out of order.
75. He approaches the concept "game" from a slightly different perspective (a different way of seeing it). He asks what does it mean to know what a game is without being able to say what a game is. This is how "concepts" have been exposed to this point, we use words without being able to define them. So he asks: "Is this knowledge somehow equivalent to an unformulated definition?"
76. He proceeds toward investigating this possibility. If someone else were to draw a boundary (define the concept), it would be different from the boundary "I" would draw; "I" want to draw no boundary at all. "His concept can then be said to be not the same as mine, but akin to it." The two concepts are like two pictures, the other having clear boundaries between the different colours, Wittgenstein's as colour patches with vague contours. (Notice the analogy with how we see things, the other person has an image with sharp boundaries, like clear 20/20 vision, Wittgenstein's is like a person who does not see so well, seeing different colours, but vague boundaries.)
77. Now he proceeds to question how the sharp bounded image can be made to correspond to the vague one. This is to investigate the question implied at 75. Is defining the concept an attempt to represent the undefined concept? He describes this as a "hopeless task". " Anything—and nothing—is
right." And he says that this is what we find in the fields of aesthetics and ethics. This would be the case if we attempted to define such concepts as "good". So, "it will be easier for you to see that the
word must have a family of meanings."
At 77 he appears to be dismissing the method of Platonic dialectics. The Platonic method is to analyze all the different ways a word is used, and attempt a synthesis which is consistent and representative of "the meaning" of the word. It requires a thorough analysis of the different ways of using the word, rejection of contradiction, and a striving towards the "ideal" representation of meaning. Wittgenstein appears to be saying that instead of trying to determine the ideal definition of words like "good", as is the method of Platonic dialectics, we ought to allow a family of meanings, because this is "easier".
There is no one thing that all things that have something in common have. Making distinctions is not the one thing that seeing what things have in common have in common.
See the second case in § 72, the shapes and shades of leafs in §73, and other examples where we see what things have in common despite their differences. Do we see a dog and a horse or cow as the same or different? In some respects we can see them as the same and in others as different. They do have a lot in common.
As to different shades of blue, as the samples get closer to green or red some will see them as blue but others will say they are no longer blue but aqua or violet. How much yellow or red makes a difference for seeing the samples as having blue in common or no longer being blue?
And yet he points these things out. See, for example, Moore’s position on perception.
Quoting Isaac
Issues such as “seeing as” and framing are things that “highly educated philosophers” are still discussing. As I said he is introducing something that will be developed later.
Quoting Isaac
The question is premature. We are still near the beginning of the book. I do not think that there is a single theme, but again it is too early to discuss whether there is one theme or several and what it or they may be.
I don't think all of the PI is in 'order' so I wouldn't count on it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's not as if the concept is just a definition to which we have yet to put words though. He's saying that that our ability to apply the unspecified definition is entirely and exhaustively what constitutes it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, this is not a good analogy because it still implies that there is something there to be seen that the blurred image is hiding from the unfocused gaze. What Wittgenstein is saying here is that often there is no hidden shape, the edges appear blurred because they actually are blurred, they remain undefined because no definition seems required for them to function. In fact they may well be more useful blurred as they are.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, I too think that's what's going on here.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't see any evidence that Wittgenstein is taking this route because he thinks it is "easier". He's taking this route because he feels the dialectic process has caused more problems than it has solved. What meanings are now clear to us, that were previously clouded, as a result of the application of the Platonic dialectic method?
But Moore's question is very different. Moore is primarily investigating the relationship between the sense-data and the object surface. In fact he quite frequently makes reference to how difficult the problem of perception judgement actually is. It is to exactly this type of difficulty that Wittgenstein is marshalling what it is that we already know about the ordinary function of this judgment.
Quoting Fooloso4
Exactly. But are ordinary people struggling with their use?
Quoting Fooloso4
Why?
Quoting Fooloso4
Again, why? I'm genuinely confused as to what you're trying to do and it's quite difficult to get involved under such seemingly arbitrary restrictions.
I do not want to compound the problem of trying to understand what W. is saying by raising questions about what Moore is saying. I am simply pointing to the fact that W. is not introducing the problem of perception out of the blue where others saw no problem. Moore’s paper Some Judgments of Perception was presented in 1918.
Quoting Isaac
They may be. Show a picture of a man watching children play to two groups of people one of which had earlier been told a story of a child molester and the other a story about a man who has just returned after being away from his family for a long time. The majority of the first group will see the man in the picture as sinister and the other as caring even though no direct connection has been made between the picture and the story. We do something similar all the time. A carpenter may see a tree as material for making a table, someone else as wood for the stove, a builder may see it as something that must be removed to build a house, and an environmentalist as an integral part of the ecosystem. We do not all simply see the same thing.
Quoting Isaac
Because it is like asking how a musical theme develops in the third movement if we have only heard the first.
Quoting Isaac
Again, how can we tell whether there is one or more themes to a piece of music if we have not yet heard the whole thing?
We are reading the book together section by section just as we would when reading it for the first time. For all I know some may be reading it for the first time. Not everyone who follows to topic contributes to it. No doubt the second time through one sees some things differently, but you cannot get there by bypassing the process of reading the text. Occasionally reference is made to latter sections but as a comment in passing rather than an attempt to jump ahead.
But you're not saying that Wittgenstein is merely tackling the problem of perception, such that support for this would be others having mentioned the problem. You were specifically defending the concept that what Wittgenstein says in these passages is in some way elucidatory. That requires a defence that others have been labouring with the actual concept you're claiming he is clarifying, and I don't see that in Moore.
Quoting Fooloso4
No we don't. And Wittgenstein points this out. But my question was not "is this the case?", my question was "does anyone seriously think it isn't?". Your examples of people seeing things differently answers the first question, not my actual question. The point here, is that which Wittgenstein comes to around 89 on, that the problem is in part that we should think anything queer is going on here. That metaphysical propositions have the character they do often only because they sound queer, not because they are.
Quoting Fooloso4
But in what examination of music does anyone make any comment at all after only hearing the first. In what form of musical exegesis do we pause after the first chords to say "well, here are some musical notes played one after the other, but let's say no more for now"?
Quoting Fooloso4
OK, so all that is about reading the text, but we are not here and now reading it are we? The activity we are undertaking collectively is writing about it. You have, in none of your explanation above made any reference to writing about it. What I'm asking you is what you would like people to write, if not what we think the author is aiming at, if not how we might use or relate to the aphorisms, then what is it about them to which you would like to restrict topics of discussion. Would you prefer I feign ignorance of the remainder of the text?
I am simply pointing to the connection between perception and conception, something he will be discussing latter on.
Quoting Isaac
I have made no claim that he is clarifying anything or addressing a particular concept that anyone else has dealt with. I simply pointed out that in a section dealing with conceptual boundaries, clarity, and so on, he gives a set of visual rather than conceptual examples.
I mentioned Moore only because you asked why he would bring up such things to an audience of highly educated philosophers, as if it were odd that highly educated philosophers would even consider such obvious things.
Quoting Isaac
People generally believe what they see. They believe they saw a creepy looking guy leering at the children. When thinking about it they may acknowledge that there may be more than one way of looking at it, but generally people act on and react to what they see without consideration of how else one might look at it or what they might see if they look at it differently.
Isn't this what W. is doing with his various examples?
Quoting Isaac
That there is something queer going on is something you interjected. There is nothing queer about it. I don’t see what metaphysical propositions have to do with the passages being discussed or anything I have said.
Quoting Isaac
That is the point. We don’t. And yet that is what you want to do here.
Quoting Isaac
There may be a great deal to say about the notes that have been played, but we cannot say anything about the notes that have not been played. We hold off saying anything about the piece as a whole until we have heard the whole of the piece.
Quoting Isaac
Some have read the whole thing but others have not. If you do not approve of this approach then why do you keep coming back just to complain about it?
I know, but the point is that "seeing what things have in common" is really a matter of overlooking their differences. So when we see all the different shades of blue, simply as blue, I think that this might actually be a deficiency in the way that we see them, because we are seeing them all as the same, "blue" when they are in fact different.
Quoting Fooloso4
Right, so if we see dogs and horses and cows all as animals, we see them as the same, animals. But I think that this is not a very precise or accurate way of seeing them, because it is a matter of overlooking all the differences between them, and seeing them all as the same, animals.
Quoting Isaac
No, he's not stating that at all, he's asking if this is the case. There's a difference between stating what one believes is the case, and asking if such and such is the case. So he asks if this is the case.
That is what he asks at 75. Then he proceeds with the analogy of the pictures, at 76-77, to demonstrate that this is not the case. Putting a definition to the concept is like producing the picture with clear boundaries to correspond with the picture with vaguely outlined colour blotches. When the picture is too vague, like in the case of "good" the task is hopeless.
Quoting Isaac
There is something there, the concept, in the undefined version the boundaries are vague and blurred. In the analogy it is "two pictures, one of which consists of colour patches with vague contours, and the other of patches similarly shaped and distributed, but with clear contours." To answer the question above (at 75) he is asking if the defined version (clear contours) can be made to correspond with the blurred version. He says that the "degree to which the sharp picture can resemble the blurred one depends on the latter's degree of vagueness." If there is not even a hint of an outline, he says that it becomes a hopeless task. This is how he sees concepts in aesthetics and ethics, concepts like "good". It would be extremely difficult (a hopeless task). So in the case of these concepts with extremely vague contours, he seems to think that it would be impossible to provide an adequate corresponding definition.
Quoting Isaac
He clearly indicates that providing a clear definition of meaning for these ethical concepts like "good", might be a "hopeless task", and states as a conclusion that it would be "easier" to consider a family of meanings.
We might see humans and pigs as being very different but we use the valves from pig hearts to replace faulty human valves. That would not be the case if it was not seen that humans and pigs have this in common.
I didn't question Wittgenstein bringing the matter up at all, I asked why you would consider that merely paraphrasing them without drawing out any philosophical conclusion was a comment worth making on a philosophy forum. The only answer I could think of was that you thought his summary in that section (that we see things differently in different circumstances) was itself the conclusion of philosophical interest,so I was questioning that. Otherwise, to use your musical analogy, all you have said is "here the composer plays some notes - we'll see why he chose those particular notes later". If all you're saying is "here Wittgenstein mentions some observations - we'll see later why he did" then isn't that just a description of any investigation of any sort, what kind of first time reader are you catering for that might be unaware that in section 72 Wittgenstein makes some observations?
Quoting Fooloso4
Right, which is the sole point I was making. I know Wittgenstein is not always easy to interpret, but you'd have to take a pretty weird reading to miss the fact that he quite clearly states that philosophy does not provide us with new facts. That people see things in different ways is a fact. That the term 'game' has several meanings is a fact. That meanings are not learned by ostention is a fact.
This is why I'm getting so frustrated, because I think Wittgenstein has a huge amount, of great significance to say. One of which is that philosophy does not provide new facts, and yet on a philosophy forum the vast majority of contributors are treating this valuable work as if it were exactly that. A series of facts about language, human psychology, colours... All because you daren't stick your neck out and say something of philosophical interest about it.
Quoting Fooloso4
What? Literally the entire book is about how we deal with metaphysical propositions. I think I'm starting to understand why we might be at such odds over this.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes, we don't because we don't make any comments at all. Who stops a piece of music after the first few bars to point out the fact that the composer has used some notes?
Quoting Fooloso4
Haven't you just answered your own question? It's because I do not approve of this approach, and, as I have mentioned before, the fact that I do not approve of this approach, and my reasons why, are absolutely pertinent to the book. The text is about conducting philosophy. We are conducting philosophy. How we do it is the subject of the text.
I had just thought this might be a thread to discuss Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, not re-write it using slightly different words.
There are several issues - same/identity and difference (a problem that is as old as philosophy itself), seeing the same thing differently, and the connection between seeing and conceiving.
Quoting Isaac
That does not mean that every passage and every issue that is addressed is a metaphysical one.
Quoting Isaac
That ignores and distorts what has been said. There has been some paraphrasing but there has been more. What there has been a lot of from you is arguing about how we should be doing this and how we should be relying on the secondary literature. It is a waste of time and I am not going to indulge you any longer.
79 The phrase "Moses did not exist" has different meanings depending on how "Moses" is defined, or described.
I believe this is a pseudo-problem created by conflating description with definition. These two are distinct. A description presupposes the existence of a thing being described, whether that thing is imaginary or not. A definition does not describe a thing, but a use, it describes the word's meaning, its use. Descriptive terms have meaning without having a thing which is being described. If there were such a thing, it would be a concept as in the case of "red". So descriptive words have potentially a definition, the definition describing the word's use. Now we introduce the proper noun, the name of a person. There is neither a definition, nor a description, which is appropriate, because this name signifies the thing to be described, whether imaginary or not. So the name, in this sense of a proper noun, cannot have an associated definition because it already has a designated use of referring to a particular thing (imaginary or not), nor is there necessarily a description for that thing.
Wittgenstein produces a similar resolution, saying that the name "N" has no fixed meaning. You can see that in the conflation of description and definition, this means that neither definition nor necessary description, can be properly assigned to it. So he asks: "Should it be said that I am using a word whose meaning I don't know, and so am talking nonsense?"
The proper noun is symbolic of the law of identity, which allows that a thing may be identified without a description. Further, the thing identified need not be a descriptive concept like in the case of "red", such that the name has meaning (use) in that way. The law of identity allows that a symbol can have meaning, by referring directly to a thing; that thing being neither a conception providing for the use of the word (and the possibility of a definition), nor is it necessary that the thing has a description whatsoever.
If you think that's what I've been doing you clearly haven't understood a word I've been saying.
81 is quite difficult, and I believe pivotal to an understanding of Wittgenstein's belief of how rules apply within language. Here's the concluding paragraph from each, ed. 3, and ed. 4
[quote=Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, ed. 3]All this, however, can only appear in the right light when one has
attained greater clarity about the concepts of understanding, meaning,
and thinking. For it will then also become clear what can lead us (and
did lead me) to think that if anyone utters a sentence and means or
understands it he is operating a calculus according to definite rules.[/quote]
[quote=Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, Hacker, Schulte, ed. 4]All this, however, can appear in the right light only when one has
attained greater clarity about the concepts of understanding, meaning
something, and thinking. For it will then also become clear what may
mislead us (and did mislead me) into thinking that if anyone utters a
sentence and means or understands it, he is thereby operating a calculus
according to definite rules.[/quote]
Notice the disagreement between "lead us", and "mislead us". I believe that this ambiguity is indicative of what Wittgenstein means when he says that someone operates according to a rule.
§73
§73 can be read as something like an ‘application’ of Witty’s argument so far. If §71 tired to show that ‘blurred concepts’ like ‘stay roughly here’ did not resolve into any further specificity upon analysis (where ‘analysis’ ought to be taken as the the opposite of synthesis: breaking apart into pieces, as opposed to putting together), §73 turns its attention to the ‘ideas in our head’ when we think of certain things. The question, as with §71, is something like: how specific does such an ‘idea' have to be? Witty answer is basically that it doesn’t have to be specific at all: it can be a ‘general’ leaf, a 'schematic’ leaf without all the details ‘filled in’ as it were. Just as ‘stay roughly here’ can also be understood as something like a general schema without 'in-built’ particularity.
The second half of §73 brings back the question of roles, although the word is not uttered as such: Witty speaks instead of 'understanding as’ (as in, to understand X as Y), which can be read as ‘to understand X playing the role of Y’ (in a language-game Z)'. The series of rhetorical questions which close off the section -
“What shape must the sample of the colour green be? Should it be rectangular? Or would it then be the sample of green rectangles?- So should it be ‘irregular’ in shape? And what is then to prevent us from viewing it a that is, from using it a only as a sample of irregularity of shape?”
- attests again to the fact that the 'same thing' can play different roles, and that there definitive answers to these questions can only be sought in relation to particular language-games: there is no 'general theory’ that would satisfy these questions in advance. One must ‘look and see’, ‘up close’ to get answers to these question. So rigorous is this that for Witty, even to understand a schema as as schema (and not as the shape of a particular leaf) ‘resides in the way the samples are used’. i.e. their role in a game.
§74 expands on the theme of understanding-as, this time tying it to the question of perception: the question of 'seeing-as'. In fact, part of what's at stake in §74 is drawing a certain kind of equivalence between seeing-as and understanding-as. A puzzle I'd like to draw out is: why this equivalence? And the clue is in the fact that Witty says that seeing-as does not imply seeing differently; [re-ordering slightly]:
§74: "It is not so ... that someone who views this leaf as a sample of ‘leaf shape in general’ will see it differently from someone who views it as, say, a sample of this particular shape".
By which I understand that the leaf will not look different, in terms of specular quality, to two different people who see the leaf-as-X in different ways [sample or general schema]. So if seeing-as differently does not mean that the leaf looks different, what does it mean? Witty's answer, as ever, turns upon how different roles imply different uses:
§74: "someone who sees the leaf in a particular way will then use it in such-and-such a way or according to such-and-such rules".
To which we might add something like: someone who sees the leaf in a different particular way will use in a different such-and-such way, etc. Note that by emphasizing use in this way - the fact that the same thing, seen-as differently, will in turn be used differently in corresponding games - Witty ends up doing something really interesting with perception: he makes it less about the sensorial, qualitative/raw 'feeling' aspect of it ('qualia', etc), so much as incorporates perception as having a part to play in intelligibility. The role of the perceived in Witty's account of intelligibility has less to do with the sensory than the grammatical(!), of all things.
This is something Witty will expand upon at length in later sections, but here I just want to note that this helps us answer the 'puzzle' I set out at the beginning - the equivalence of understanding and perception. By modelling, as it were, the latter on the former, Witty aims to once again 'de-interiorize' perception - just as he did with the memory-image in §56/57. Just as, in §56/57, the importance of the memory-image had to do with its role in a langauge-game, so too does perception's importance come out in the role it also plays in an economy of use:
§74: "Whoever sees a sample like this will in general use it in this way, and whoever sees it otherwise in another way."
I believe that what is said here, is that to "see" a sample as a sample of a universal, rather than as a particular, might be said to "see" the sample differently, but it is not really a matter of seeing the sample differently, it is really a matter of using the sample differently. So if we say that the person sees the sample differently, "this might well be so—though it is not so—for it would only be to say that, as a
matter of experience, if you see the leaf in a particular way, you use it in such-and-such a way or according to such-and-such rules." I.e., when you see the leaf in this or that way, you are using the image of it, in your mind, in this or that way. The sample is understood as...
Quoting StreetlightX
Here's a brief note on this subject. I do not agree with this characterization of a "de-interiorizing" at this point. There is no warrant for an exterior/interior dichotomy here. And this is the same as at 56/57, the division of internal/external is shown to be irrelevant. There are internal and external aspects implicated, but to create such a division is of no advantage to the inquiry. Witty is describing the way that one "sees" the sample in ostensive definition (73), as a consequence of the way that the sample is used in demonstration. (You might call this an external using of the sample.) Further, the way that one "sees" the sample (74), "the sample is understood as...", is itself a using of the sample by the learner. (You might call this an internal using of the sample within one's mind.) So talking in these terms, of how the sample is used, does not immediately necessitate an internal/external division, the sample is used internally and externally. "How the sample is seen", or more appropriately, 'the sample is understood as...", is a description of the use of the sample, whether it's using the sample externally in demonstration, or using the sample internally in understanding.
That's my point too.
W then asks: "Might there not be such 'general' samples?" - i.e. physical instances of the paradigmatic picture? "Certainly!" he says, but whether this 'general' sample is to be understood as a paradigmatic type or instead as a particular token depends on how the sample is used, or "the way the samples are applied".
What shape should a sample of "pure green" be? If it were, e.g., a rectangular or an irregular shape, then we might mistake it for a sample of shape instead of colour. This demonstrates that it depends on how the samples are used, and that we cannot just assume that it will play the role of a colour sample regardless of any context of use.
§74. W raises the idea that someone who views a leaf as a sample of a paradigmatic type sees it differently from someone who views the same leaf as a sample of a particular token. He quickly dismisses this idea insofar as seeing it differently amounts only to using it differently. He does not deny that people can see things differently, but this is exhibited by their use of those things, and by their use of language in relation to those things.
Wittgenstein answers in the form of a question that could be rewritten as: "my knowledge, my concept of a game, [is] completely expressed in the explanations that I could give".
Notice that at 75 he asks the following question concerning knowing what a game is without being able to say what it is:
"Is this knowledge somehow equivalent to an unformulated definition?"
An "unformulated definition" suggests that there is something of my knowledge (i.e. something mental) which is left unexpressed in the "mere" giving of explanations (e.g. by providing a list of typical examples). If this missing something were able to be formulated, then maybe "I’d be able to recognize it as the expression of my knowledge". But this picture is inaccurate. Instead: "my knowledge...[is] completely expressed in the explanations that I could give".
He's saying, that if his knowledge of what a game is, is equivalent to an unformulated definition, then he ought to be able to formulate that definition, and this description, or explanation, which he ought to be able to produce, if his knowledge is like that, would completely express his knowledge of what a game is.
He's going to show at 76-77, that his knowledge of what a game is, is not like this. It is not the case that he could produce an explanation, description, or definition, which could express his knowledge of what a game is, because it would be extremely difficult to make that explanation, description, or definition "correspond" with the knowledge that he has of what a game is. This would be a hopeless task.
Then why does he ask whether his knowledge is not completely expressed in the explanations that he could give? Your account is inconsistent with the preceding passages:
Keep in my, that at 75 he is asking those questions. He provides no answer to them at 75. To answer these questions he draws the analogy of two pictures at 76. Another person wants sharp boundaries to the concept "game" (definition), Wittgenstein does not want such boundaries. Wittgenstein's "picture" is one of colour patches with vague contours, the other person's "picture" has similarly distributed colours, with sharp contours. There are similarities between them, and there are differences. He proceeds to investigate the correlation at 77.
Last week, in my post: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/246986 I said this is analogous to comparing what a person with poor vision sees, to what one with 20/20 vision sees. and Isaac did not like my analogy. But really it's Wittgenstein's own analogy of "seeing", and we do judge whether a person sees better or worse.
In any case, Wittgenstein proceeds with the two pictures analogy at 77, to investigate whether a picture with clearly defined colour contours can be made to correspond with the one with vague colour patches. As I said in the post referenced above, I see this a s a rejection of Platonic dialectics.
§77. The degree of resemblance between the sharp and blurred colour patches (at §76) "depends on the degree to which the latter lacks sharpness". W asks us to imagine drawing a sharp rectangle which 'corresponds' to a blurred one, before noting that this is a "hopeless task".
W indicates that the concepts of ethics and aesthetics contain a high degree of blurriness, and that (e.g.) philosophers have a similarly hopeless task of trying to find "definitions that correspond to our concepts".
I think he goes even further than this, suggesting that since it is a hopeless task, we ought not even try to define ethical words like "good", instead, recognizing that such words just naturally have a "family of meanings". That is why I said he is rejecting Platonic dialectics, which is a method that analyzes different sorts of usage in an attempt to produce the ideal definition which all usage partakes of; as exemplified by "the good".
http://letourcritique.u-paris10.fr/index.php/letourcritique/article/view/27/html
From what I understand, Wittgenstein was not impressed by the philosophical discussions of the "Apostles". Probably their skepticism was too institutionalized and not radical enough for him. He seems to have had within him the Karl Marx attitude --- strip the Idea of all formal aspects, leaving exposed its material basis.
How’s the discussion going? Where we all at (roughly speaking?)
Oh ... unenlightened ... referring to your post about 20 pages back! Language doesn’t need “sound”. And “pointing out” doesn’t need vision either ;)
On the one hand I am not going to disagree with you, and on the other I am not going to search back to find out why that is an apparent inconsistency on my part. Instead I will assume that such an obvious comment is only inconsistent with an uncharitably literal reading of whatever I said, or else that i was having a senior moment that no one else was so disrespectful as to mention to me. :joke:
§75 continues Witty’s expression of skepticism regarding the exhaustion of a concept by its definition. So to the pair of rhetorical questions: “Is this knowledge [of a game] somehow equivalent to an unformulated definition? So that if it were formulated, I’d be able to recognize it as the expression of my knowledge?”, I can only imagine Witty answering both in the negative. The formulation of the next question is somewhat more interesting though:
"Isn’t my knowledge, my concept of a game, completely expressed in the explanations that I could give? That is, in my describing examples of various kinds of game, showing how all sorts of other games can be constructed on the analogy of these, saying that I would hardly call this or that a game, and so on”. (my bolding)
The juxtaposition of ‘completely expressed” - which suggests a sense of exhaustiveness - along with “could” and ‘and so on’ - which suggest open-endedness and in-exhaustion - strikes me as notable. That the 'completely expressed’ is, qua 'complete', nonetheless open-ended suggests to me that Witty wants to gives a different sense to the very idea of ‘completion’, that ‘completion’ or ‘the completely expressed’ does not need to be ‘closed’ in the sense of having an exact intensional definition, but can itself be subject to elaboration, variety, and context.
§76
§76 riffs again on how concepts do not need to be exactly bounded, and that, even if one were to supply a boundary (read: definition), this would not make the two concepts - one unbounded, the other not - the same. There would bb affinities, with still with differences.
§77
§77 seems to want to ‘apply’ the preceding remarks to what happens when we employ concepts in the sphere of aesthetics and ethics, the implication presumably being that the concepts involved in both are inherently fuzzy, and attempts to employ definitions here are doomed to failure. There isn’t really an argument here, it ought to be noted, so much as an assertion of ‘where Witty stands on this’.
§77 also begins to address a point that will come up in detail later: that of skepticism, and how to address it. For, if Witty is right that fuzzy concepts cannot be subject to definitions (by definition?), then one implication might simply be that 'anything goes’ - “Anything - and nothing - is right”. As an antidote to this kind of ‘definitional skepticism’, as one might term it, Witty offers the following panacea: “
§77: "In this sort of predicament, always ask yourself: How did we learn the meaning of this word (“good”, for instance)? From what sort of examples? In what language-games? Then it will be easier for you to see that the word must have a family of meanings”.
In other words, if one has lost one’s bearings on a concept, look to the language-game in which that concept is employed: that language-game - and not a definition - will (help) provide those lost bearings.
There's a discrepancy here between your use of "language-game" and Wittgenstein's use of "language-games". The "family of meanings" is associated with a multitude of "language-games". To find one's bearings on a concept (as you say) requires identifying the appropriate language-game. But this is a type of comparison, as to a sample or a paradigm, and it is what Wittgenstein is trying to avoid.
So he doesn't exactly choose this route. Choosing the appropriate language-game would be like choosing a definition. Wittgenstein appears to me, to be advocating restraint from even making such a choice, and this would leave "the meaning" if there was such a thing, as ambiguous. Instead, there is a family of "meanings". It's like a matter of possibilities, and to understand this requires understanding the very nature of "possibility". Choosing one possibility, as the correct one, negates the others as possibilities. They are no longer possibilities if another has been selected. To leave them in their true state as "possibilities" requires not choosing. Therefore there is no "meaning", only the possibility of meaning, which is intelligible as a family of possible "meanings", represented by numerous related language-games.
§78
§78 works to cast the whole of the preceding discussion about definitions into a distinction between knowing and saying. At stake here seems to be a twofold attempt to show, concretely, both the point(s) of overlap and point(s) of divergence between the two terms. Correspondingly, this serves two purposes that I see: first, by highlighting the similarities, Witty shows quite nicely how the a confusion between the grammar of the two might arise - how it is that we might take a definition of something (‘saying’ something) to be exhaustive of our knowledge of it [cases (1) and (2)].
Second, by highlighting how the terms diverge [case (3)], he aims to clearly show that a distinction exists; that one can drive a clear and obvious wedge between the grammar of saying and knowing.
§79
§79 works to iterate or project the discussion of definitions once again into yet another avenue: that of names. Those familiar with Kripke will recognise it as containing the seeds of Kripke’s anti-descriptivism, which, admittedly, I can’t help but read this section through the lens of. Anyway, the basic idea is that just as an imperative to “stay roughly here” is not exhausted by any particular boundary (§71), so too are names not exhausted by any particular descriptive determination:
§79: “So is my use of the name “Moses” fixed and determined for all possible cases? … But where are the boundaries []? … I use the name “N” without a fixed meaning”.
As a general comment, one way I’ve been framing a lot of this discussion in my head - and Witty’s approach in general - is as an attempt to discern what I’d call the immanence of meaning to use: the fact that the meaning of something attains it’s ‘adequacy’ always in relation to the circumstances of its invocation (‘use’): if one says ‘stay roughly here’, or if one uses a name, meaning here is not ‘built out of’ smaller pieces (simples) which, when put together the right way, would ‘give’ meaning to these things. Names are always adequate to what use we make of them: attempts to resolve names down to finer grained descriptions are always bound to fail.
In my head, I almost think of this visually: if a meaning is this: — — , one can’t ‘take it apart’ so as to attain pieces like this: ‘- - - - - -‘; meaning does not derive from a synthesis of smaller, more foundational things, and therefore cannot be analyzed out into any such pieces. The adequacy of meaning is immanent to use, and does not lie beyond it. This stuff really comes out in Witty's discussion of math, but alas that's beyond this thread.
§80 continues with yet another variation on the theme of definitions not exhausting meaning, this time treating common nouns ('chair'), instead of proper nouns (names, §79), and imperatives ('stay roughly here', §71). One further advance in the discussion is the re-invocation of 'rules' as similarly not exhausting the employment of common nouns like 'chair'. Interestingly then, there's an equivalence being set up, in some respect, between rules, simples, and definitions, and the respective roles they play (or rather don't play) in defining the boundaries of their respective concepts or words (common nouns, proper nouns, and imperatives, at the very least).
§1-§27: Imperatives (block! slab!)
§28-§36: Demonstratives (this, that)
§37-§45: Names (Nothung, Mr. N.N.)
§46-§64: Linguistic Roles (Simples, Composites, and Iterations thereof)
§65-§80: Definitions and Boundaries
§81-88(?): Rules, Logic, and Idealization
---
Anyway, lets tackle §81:
It's worth recalling some of what motivates the current discussion before digging into it, specifically, Witty's comment back in §65 that there is no 'general form of the proposition', and that one must look 'close up' in order to understand language. In this light, §81 and onwards is something like a critique of what happens when you do the opposite of this: a look at what happens when language is not looked at from 'close up', and instead treated in an 'ideal' sense.
Witty begins by comparing the use of language to games and "calculi with fixed rules", and notes that there is nothing necessary about any such comparison: language use can be compared to games, but this doesn't mean that it really 'is' or 'must be' such a game. Language-use has an autonomy from any such 'fixed calculi' at the end of the day, and cannot be reduced to them. Or, to put it sharply, there is an irreducible wedge between language and logic.
In saying this however, Witty also wants to stave off another misunderstanding that may follow from this: the idea that language is somehow then a degraded or less-perfect thing than logic. The basic idea is that logic if not an 'ideal language' of which specific instances of human language are lesser forms of. In saying this, Witty interestingly sheds light not only on language, but on logic as well: following (his understanding of) Ramsey, Witty understands logic to be a matter of construction, something 'made' and not 'found'.
Hence, in turn, the sharp distinction between the way in which 'natural science treats of a natural phenomenon', and logic, which deals with ideal constructions. This sharp distinction helps explain the reference to Ramsey at the beginning, in which logic is referred to as a 'normative science'. The idea being that something constructed must at every point be governed by some kind of imperative or rule which enables transitivity between propositions (this follows from that if...; think of axiomatic systems where every move must be justified according to the axioms which ground it). Note that 'normative' here must be understood in its formal and logic sense, and not its ethical and juridicial sense.
By contrast, natural phenomena do not participate in any such economies of inference, but instead economies of causes. I'm admittedly banking on a distinction treated in detail by Sellars on this (causes vs. reasons), but I think putting it in these terms - although not explicitly employed by Wittgenstein - is very useful in helping to understand the sharp distinctions at work in §81 (and I know I keep dragging it in, but in the remarks and lectures on Math, Witty continuously makes reference to the distinction between natural phenomena and ideal language and insists constantly just how important it is to keep the two apart).
Not much to say about these as they are fairly straightforward: just as Witty questions the exhaustion of meaning by definitions, here he questions the exhaustion of langauge-use by rules - much as he did in §80. §82 is basically a series of rhetorical questions all meant to prise open an gap between language and rules, and §83 offering something like a parable also meant to put into question the idea that all language-use is exhaustively delineated by rules.
In any case the gist is this: just as complexes cannot be analyzed-out into simples, neither can language-use be analyzed-out into rules.
I think that this is the importance of 81. It is a separating of the notion of "perfect" from the notion of "ideal", such that perfection can be something other than the ideal. We can characterise mathematics and logic as ideal languages, but everyday language is no less perfect in its existence as everyday language, than the constructed ideal languages of logic. So it will come out in the following sections that "inexact" does not mean "imperfect". Metaphysically, or ontologically, perfection inheres within the existence of language itself, and is not to be found in the form that it takes.
This has deep implications with respect to how we apprehend the relationship between rules and language. If we characterize ideal languages as languages whose existence is dependent on rules, and strict adherence to rules, then everyday language escapes this characterization, of "rule-based" and does not appear to be governed by rules. But if we characterize "rules" in a different way, such that the ambiguity found within everyday language inheres within the rules themselves, then everyday language can still be said to consist of rules. The two perspectives create two distinct possibilities for the relationship between language and rules. On the one hand, only ideal languages are instances of following rules, and so the construction of rule based languages follows from everyday language which is not rule based. On the other hand, all language use involves rules, but rules are inherently ambiguous, such that different people can go different ways following the same rule.
The two different perspectives create completely different interpretations of what Wittgenstein is saying at 81, and indecision as to exactly what he is saying is evident in the different translations. Here I will repost what I said about #81 last month.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I believe that what follows in the next section of the PI is indication that Wittgenstein takes the position that all language use is an instance of following rules, and that ambiguity is inherent with rules themselves. The reason for the reference to being "mislead" is found in the reference to "definite rules". Ideal languages such as logic use "definite rules", but everyday language uses more ambiguous rules. That one is not more "perfect" than the other is found at #98:
"That is to say, we are not striving after an ideal,
as if our ordinary vague sentences had not yet got a quite unexceptionable
sense, and a perfect language awaited construction by us.—On the
other hand it seems clear that where there is sense there must be perfect
order.——So there must be perfect order even in the vaguest sentence." --- Philosophical Investigations. #98
At 82 - 84 you'll see that he describes situations in which rules are being followed, even when we cannot say what the rule is which is being followed. Even if we play a game in which we make up rules as we go, we would be following rules in making up the rules. At 85, a rule is described as a 'sign-post". The sign-post does not tell you which way to go, your interpretation of the sign post tells you which way to go. From this, we can conclude that Wittgenstein opts for the position that rules are inherently ambiguous, and that all instances of using language are instances of using rules, despite the fact that the rules are not "definite rules", and the same rule (sign-post) might lead one person in one direction, and another person in another direction. Therefore the "perfection" of language is found in its very existence, as the existence of rules (signs), despite their ambiguity, and it is not found in the exactness, or the ideal nature, of any rules.
§84 introduces the question of doubt into the mix. Lots has been written on Witty's take on doubt - especially in the later sections on pain, and his more focused remarks in On Certainty - so it's worth noting its appearance here for the first time in an explicit manner in the PI.
In any case, importantly for this section, doubt is introduced in its relation to rules, the question being: if the application of a word is 'not everywhere bounded by rules', does this mean that cases not covered by such rules always necessarily in doubt as to their use? I imagine this somewhat pictorially: as though one carves out a little bounded space of certainty among a larger, ambient space of doubt (light surrounded by darkness, as it were).
But this is a picture Witty rejects, or at least, ascribes instead to the imagination, rather than reality: just because we can 'imagine' doubts, 'is not to say that we are in doubt'. At stake here is again the question of regress: must there be rules that 'regulate the application of rules' ad infinitum? Witty's closing remark: "but for all that, I do not doubt in such a case", suggests not. §86 will make this point particularly clear.
In this connection, it's worth harking all the way back to §1, where, in relation to looking up words in the color chart, and asking all sorts of further questions (§1: “But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’ and what he is to do with the word ‘five’?”), Witty simply says: "Explanations come to an end somewhere." This theme of stopping infinite regress (questions of doubt and justification) will become increasingly important later down the road.
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In a larger context, it ought to be noted that this is effectively a thoroughly anti-Cartesian stance: generalized doubt, belonging as it does to the imagination and not reality, entirely reverses the Cartesian operation in which doubt is primary. This is a pretty obvious point, so I simply mention it without further comment.
§85 brings together a number of important themes covered in the course of the book so far, although if you blink, you might miss it. For, by linking rules to ‘signposts’, Witty brings to bear upon rules the entire discussion of ostension undertaken in the earlier sections in the PI. The following line in particular makes it clear:
§85: "But where does it [the signpost, the rule - SX] say which way I am to follow it; whether in the direction of its finger or (for example) in the opposite one?”
It’s worth recalling that one of the imports of Witty's discussion of of ostension was that ostension is thoroughly differential: the same pointing gesture may point out any number of different things, and that
§30: "An ostensive definition explains the use a the meaning a of a word if the role the word is supposed to play in the language is already clear.”
Similarly, rules too must be understood in a differential manner: what rules ‘do’ depends on the role that rules themselves play in a particular language-game. This differential nature of rules is captured in §85 itself:
"And if there were not a single signpost, but a sequence of signposts or chalk marks on the ground - is there only one way of interpreting them?” (this rhetorical question obviously being meant to be answered in the negative - SX).
Yet for all this, the most important part of §85 is contained in the last section, which ties all this once again back to the question of doubt. Does the differential nature of the rule, the fact that it can be interpreted in more than one way, lead automatically - ‘philosophically’, as Witty says - to doubt (one thinks here again of Descartes)? In line with his downplaying of doubt in §84, Witty here 'relegates' doubt from a ‘philosophical’ register to an ‘empirical’ one:
§85: "[The signpost, the rule] sometimes leaves room for doubt, and sometimes not. And now this is no longer a philosophical proposition, but an empirical one.”
This too ties in to Witty’s appeal to look at things ‘up close’, and to avoid any attempts at a ‘general form of the proposition’. Such attempts wrongly transform doubt from an properly empirical matter, into a ‘philosophical’ - I’d prefer to say transcendental - one.
Much like §85, §86 also serves to integrate some of the apparently disparate themes so far addressed. Indeed, it explicitly relates itself back to the language-game in §2, in which ‘block’ and ‘slab’ were called out. §86 revises the game somewhat, with written instead of spoken words. In this sense it’s actually made to look a lot like the language-game in §1, with the shopkeeper who looks up color words in a chart. If we recall, §1 opened with the problem of regress - if the shopkeeper has to look up a chart, how does he know what to do while looking up the chart? And how does he know how to do that, and so on? In response Witty affirms: ‘explanations come to an end somewhere’.
In this connection, §86 moves the discussion forward by relating all of this to rules. The chart, in §86, functions as a rule (§86: "So the chart is a rule”). And as a rule (much like an ostensive act!), it can be read in different ways:
§86: “Suppose different ways of reading a chart were not introduced; one time according to the schema … another time according to this schema … or some other one…"
With Witty again addressing the question of infinite regress with a series of rhetorical questions:
§86: "Can we not now imagine further rules to explain this one? And, on the other hand, was that first chart incomplete without the schema of arrows? And are the other charts incomplete without their schemata?”
And although Witty doesn’t come right out and say it, one can infer, given both the tone of the questioning, as well as from the answer given in §1, that these questions must, like most of Witty’s series of rhetorical questions, be answered with a big fat ‘no’.
I think it may be appropriate to call this section a "de-interiorizing" of rules. The rule is given a physical presence, it stands there, like a sign-post. So in the case of language, the rule is the physical presence of the words. The rule is not what the sign means to the person who interprets it, it is the sign itself.
I believe that this is an acceptable ontological principle, but if we adhere to this premise, we need to respect the implications. The principal implication, as Wittgenstein points out, is the existence of doubt. If the rules by which we know and understand things, are outside of the mind, not directly accessed by the mind (noumena, in Kant's terms), and what is present to the mind is a representation of the rules (phenomena), then doubt is justified in all of our knowledge and understanding. This is because doubt with respect to the rules by which we know and understand, is itself justified.
The infinite regress which would be created by characterizing 'the rule" as a principle within the mind, is an infinite chain of needing a rule to understand a rule. If the rule is positioned outside of the mind, as Witty does, the "sign-post", then it is not by means of rules that the mind interprets and understands rules, because rules are not within the mind. The mind must have within itself something other than rules by which it understands. But if it is not the case that rules are at the bottom, the foundation, the basis for the mind's understanding, but are something which need to be themselves understood by the mind, using something other than rules, then doubt is a real concern.
Wittgenstein grapples with this problem in "On Certainty" and attempts to establish some principles to contain doubt. He attempts to distinguish between situations where doubt is reasonable, and situations where doubt is unreasonable. The problem with his procedure is that his ontology of rules makes some degree of doubt reasonable in every situation. So we cannot separate doubt from the situation, to say that there are situations where doubt could be excluded, as appears to be Witty's intent in On Certainty. So when he proceeds in this way, he's producing an incoherent epistemology. The kernel of this incoherency is evident at #85
[quote= Philosophical Investigations 85] ---So I can say, the sign-post does after all leave no room for doubt. Or rather: it sometimes leaves room for doubt and sometimes not. And now this is no longer a philosophical proposition, but an empirical one.[/quote]
I believe this empirical proposition is false. Instead of describing the sign-post as always leaving some room for doubt, even if it's the most minute, infinitesimal degree of doubt, and each different instance of occurrence having a different degree of doubt, he describes the sign-post as sometimes leaving room for doubt, and sometimes not. The difference between these two descriptions amounts to a substantial epistemological difference.
I think the following from the Tractatus is instructive:
In line with Wittgenstein’s mystical bent I suggest that what is at issue is not simply an epistemological problem, that we have no knowledge of causality, but an ontological one. It may be that when I open the door there will be a yawning abyss. That things are as they are does not guarantee that they will continue to be so. This does not mean that we have good reason to doubt that they will be so. It is, rather, a recognition of the radical contingency of existence.
From On Certainty:
§87 now carries over the discussion of doubt into the discussion of proper names (which we left off in §79, and in which, to roughly recall, it was argued that names are not exhausted by any particular description). §87 then tries to draw out the implications of this ‘inexhaustiveness’ with respect to doubt: If the explanation of the use of a name cannot, or rather, is not exhausted by the ‘elements’ of that name (I think of set: Moses: {man, led Israelites out of Egypt,, etc}), does that mean doubt about the use of the name is always possible? Does explanation here need to ‘go all the way down’, as it were? And if it doesn’t, does this automatically induce doubt?
(Another image, one similar to the one Witty uses: the name ‘Moses’, atop an infinite pyramid of explanatory terms, each one explained in more detail by the level below. Cf: §87: "As though an explanation, as it were, hung in the air unless supported by another one”.)
But just as Witty has rejected the infinite cascade of rules that explain other rules ad infinitum (§84, §86), so too is this infinite pyramid of explanations rejected - §87: "an explanation may indeed rest on another one that has been given, but none stands in need of another”; Explanations are adequate to the degree that they simply remove a ‘local’ misunderstanding: “an explanation serves to remove or to prevent a misunderstanding … The signpost is in order - if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose.”
One way I like to think about all this is to draw a distinction between what might be called transcendental doubt and empirical doubt: transcendental doubt being a kind of a priori doubt, a doubt which, by default, serves to infest gaps in the ‘foundations’ of the explanatory pyramid, wherever they may be (§87: "It may easily look as if every doubt merely revealed a gap in the foundations; so that secure understanding is possible only if we first doubt everything that can be doubted, and then remove all these doubts”).
But for Witty, insofar as such pyramids are unnecessary - we can understand the meaning of names perfectly well without them - so too are such transcendental doubts simply illusions. The only doubts we ought to entertain here are the empirical ones, the ones that crop up in the course of explanation (cf. §85: "this is no longer a philosophical proposition, but an empirical one"). In line with this one can also consider two kinds of corresponding explanations: transcendental explanations and empirical ones: transcendental ones being of the kind like the explanatory pyramid, an a priori structure which each explanation of one thing relates to every other in a globally structured, networked manner. And correlatively to his rejection of transcendental doubt, so too does Witty reject transcendental explanation: §87: ”none stands in need of another”.
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Almost done with this section, one more to go before a whole new 'part' of the PI begins.
This passage at 85: "So I can say, the sign-post does after all leave no room for doubt." is inconsistent with this passage at 87: "The sign-post is in order—if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose." The latter "if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose", is inconsistent with "no room for doubt".
Who is Norman the Normal? Expecting the German invasion, we Brits turned the signposts around, and took down the railway station signs. Some people collect old signs. These are not normal circumstances. Sign posts belong at crossroads, at the parting of ways. I don't know how i know, but I do know,under normal circumstances, how to read a signpost. I think if there is something important being said here, it is where and when to theorise a conspiracy, and where and when it is fatuous and counterproductive. The line is somewhere short of "absolute certainty".
Right, so how would you know whether the circumstances are normal or not, to know whether you ought to doubt your reading or not? What even constitutes "normal circumstances"?
The point though, is that "leave no room for doubt" (85) implies absolute certainty, whereas "under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose" (87) implies something other than absolute certainty. And, since we are talking about the rules (sign-posts) which are foundational to knowledge and understanding, the epistemological difference is significant, depending on which of these two, one chooses to believe.
The latter, "somewhere short of 'absolute certainty'", is what I believe to be the true description. However, in "On Certainty", Wittgenstein proceeds in an attempt to justify some sense of the phrase "it is certain that...", and this is a falling back onto the ideal, 'absolute certainty', which he is here, in his description, trying to dispatch.
OK, last one before things start to ease-up and we get to the 'Wittgenstein rants about philosophy for 40 paragraphs' section. Anyway, §88 is a reflection of the way in which terms like 'exact' and 'inexact' are used when it comes to issues of explanations. Witty's basic question is something like: exact or inexact with respect to what, exactly? As with his rejection of what I called the explanatory pyramid before, here too he rejects the idea that 'exactness' must be exact 'all the way down', as if one must have an specification of 'exactness' at each 'level' - again, explanation ad infinitum and regress are rejected:
§88: "Perhaps like drawing a boundary-line around a region with chalk? Here it strikes us at once that the line has breadth. So a colour edge would be more exact. But has this exactness still got a function here: isn’t it running idle? Moreover, we haven’t yet laid down what is to count as overstepping this sharp boundary; how, with what instruments, it is to be ascertained. And so on."
So if this idealized notion of exactness (transcendental exactness, we might even call it), isn't appropriate, what notion of exactness is? Well, Witty says, it depends on what you're trying to do with the 'exactness' in question: §88: "what is inexact attains its goal less perfectly than does what is more exact. So it all depends on what we call “the goal”. So if I just want to be able to find you after i get back from my toilet break, 'stay roughly here' will more or less suffice for that goal. There's no need to get any 'deeper' (just as it's not inexact "when I don’t give our distance from the sun to the nearest metre, or tell a joiner the width of a table to the nearest thousandth of a millimetre").
At one point Witty veers even into making 'exact' and 'inexact' nothing more than dispositions: “inexact” is really a reproach, and “exact” is praise."; To put this all otherwise: there are no 'absolute' explanations, explanations 'in-themselves': there are only explanations relative to whatever it is you're trying to do with that explanation. This is all of a piece with his skepticism regarding 'ideal' languages (§81), and how language-use must be treated on its own terms, and not with respect to some ideal of it (compare: §88: "No single ideal of exactness has been envisaged; we do not know what we are to make of this idea"; and §81: "the word “ideal” is liable to mislead, for it sounds as if these languages were better, more perfect, than our everyday language").
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Anyway, this might be my last post here for some time, as I'm overseas for about a month. I'll still post but not at this frequency. It's a good place in the book to slow down anyway, as the next few sections really mark a change in pace and tone from what has come so far.
Yes. The fact that I have just answered the questions you are asking, indicates that circumstances are not normal. Let me put it simply. Normality is what is assumed to be the case until something abnormal impinges. In this case, what is abnormal is your question about knowing what is normal. I don't need a reason to think that sign posts stand at junctions and indicate what lies down the road. That's normal. The answer to, 'how would you know ...?' is 'why would you ask ...? And you might have a good reason for asking, for thinking things might not be normal. But you have to bring that forward before your question makes sense, otherwise it becomes one of those endlessly repeating games. How would you know you are asking a sensible question?
Yes, I had good reason for asking. You used the phrase "normal circumstances", so I asked for an explanation, how would I know if the circumstances are normal or not. This is what Wittgenstein is investigating at 87, such explanations. Is there is a way to end the possibility of infinite regress of explanations required to ensure that one does not misunderstand? Yes, there is an end he says, but this end only exists under "normal circumstances". But if "normal circumstances" itself needs further explanation, then this is not a real solution to the problem.
Quoting unenlightened
Actually, the onus is on you. When you use language, it is always respectable for the hearer to ask for clarification, so such a question (how would you know whether the circumstances are normal or not?) always makes sense. It makes sense because the hearer is asking in order to avoid misunderstanding. It always makes sense to ask for clarification in order to avoid misunderstanding. And, it is disrespectful, and doesn't make sense to automatically assume that the asker is playing an endless repeater game.
If you happen to believe that under "normal circumstances", it does not make sense to ask for clarification of a statement, in order to avoid misunderstanding, then you need to explain how one would know whether the circumstances are normal or not, in order to avoid asking for clarification (in an effort to avoid misunderstanding), in times when it doesn't make sense to ask for clarification..
No, that's exactly what I don't need to explain, because that is exactly what I have just explained it doesn't make sense to ask for further explanation of. One can, by definition, only tell normality by experience, Normally I have coffee for breakfast, if I don't, circumstances are not normal; perhaps the coffee has run out, perhaps I have died, perhaps some other abnormality. If you didn't know what I normally have for breakfast, there is no way of knowing whether my lying corpse-like on the kitchen floor is normal or not.
What he does here is replace "the ideal" with "the goal". The degree of exactitude required in any particular circumstance is relative to "the goal". Therefore exactitude is defined in relation to practise, rather than defining it in relation to a theoretical "ideal". Again, this is a rejection of platonic dialectics. Plato would position "the goal", as the ideal, such that the ultimate goal is the ideal, and any particular instance of "a goal", would only have meaning in relation to the absolute, the ideal.
His example of time is quite powerful. We can measure time by seconds, we can measure time by nanoseconds, or whatever, each giving a different level of exactitude for a different purpose. And there is no "ideal' or absolute exactness in relation to time, which we could strive for as a goal, as relativity theory has removed this.
Quoting unenlightened
All you are saying is that my inability to understand what you mean by "normal circumstances" doesn't make sense to you. That's fine, I'll just go on my merry way, bringing my lack of understanding with me. But no matter how much you insist that it doesn't make sense for me to ask for further explanation, my lack of understanding will continue to exist until you provide for me a satisfactory explanation. You cannot make a person's lack of understanding disappear simply by insisting that the person's questioning doesn't make sense to you.
That's the whole problem with Wittgenstein's approach to doubt. If a person has doubt, then that doubt can only be removed by answering the person's questions, and providing appropriate explanations for that person. You cannot just tell the person, your doubt doesn't make sense to me, therefore it is unreasonable doubt, and assume that this will make the doubt nonexistent.
No I'm not. I'm saying it doesn't make sense at all, to me to you, or to Norman the Norm.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You can accuse me of this, but not Wittgenstein. He's "just" written a great fat book going into it in exhaustive detail from every possible angle with many many examples. Me, I'm about ready to make with the poker already.
It makes sense to me. Every moment I live from day to day is different from the last. How would I say that the circumstances at one moment are normal, but the circumstances at another moment are not normal?
Quoting unenlightened
Have you read "On Certainty"? If he takes it for granted that "normal circumstances" requires no further explanation, then his epistemology has a big problem. The problem with "many many examples", is that each example is different, so the more examples that one produces the more evidence one gives, that "normal circumstances" is incomprehensible. If it requires normal circumstances to exclude doubt, then doubt will never be excluded because circumstances are never normal.
As you honestly don't seem to understand, I've thought of an example to elucidate. Every morning when I leave the house I have a little routine of chores that I do outside before I go to work. One of the things I do is to feed some cats outside, so I bring a little plastic bag with some cat food. So under "normal circumstances" when I go out the door I am carrying a little bag of cat food. But some times I'm bringing other things, or I'm distracted talking to someone, or thinking about philosophy, and I forget the cat foot, so this is an "abnormal circumstance". Now, when I'm going out the door, it clearly makes sense to doubt myself in the abnormal circumstances, before I proceed, because then I will notice that I've forgotten something. Also, it appears like it doesn't make sense to doubt myself before proceeding in the normal circumstances, because that doubting would be a useless waste of time. However, I will never know whether the circumstances are normal circumstances or abnormal circumstances, unless I doubt. So it actually does make sense to doubt myself every time I go out the door, in order to distinguish the normal situations from the abnormal situations.
Compare this to understanding the sign-post, or another person's use of language. Under normal circumstances I have a correct and adequate understanding of what the other person is saying. It is an abnormal circumstance if my understanding is mistaken. In the abnormal circumstances, when my understanding is mistaken, it clearly makes sense to doubt my understanding. And, it appears like it doesn't make sense to doubt my understanding in the normal circumstances when my understanding is correct and adequate. However, this appearance is an illusion created by the way that the situation is being described. In reality, I cannot determine whether the circumstances are normal or abnormal without doubting. Therefore, if we base whether doubting is justified or not, on a determination of normal or abnormal circumstances, doubting is always justified because this determination requires doubt.
In other words, one cannot avoid doubt by judging the normalcy of the circumstances, because the very premise which produces the need for that judgement, the possibility that the circumstances might be abnormal, itself justifies doubt.
Indeed one cannot, and so one does not make such a judgement. In making that judgement one would have already raised the question that the judgement would give one reason to raise or not to raise. The whole point is that one does not need a reason not to doubt, but a reason to doubt. If I notice the ground around the post is disturbed, or the paint is still wet, then I might have a reason to doubt - I don't need a reason not to doubt that the sign post is doing its job. What you seem to be describing is close to OCD. And my experience of living with someone with OCD is that the endless unjustified self-doubt in the end makes decisions less reliable not more.
This is clearly not the case. Our natural approach to all circumstances is to consider possibilities. And, the nature of possibility makes doubt natural, whereas certainty is only created by subjecting possibilities to the principles of probability. Therefore the reasoning of probability gives us reason not to doubt. But without probabilities we are presented with possibilities and no certainty, so doubt is natural. Doubt is fundamental, and reason is needed to exclude doubt.
Quoting unenlightened
The job of the sign-post is to direct you in the intended direction. You are the person reading the sign. You need a reason to believe that you are reading the sign correctly, otherwise you are unsure as to whether you are reading the sign correctly (doubt). Doubt as to the intent of the sign-post, is the natural state when you approach the sign-post, unless you have a reason to believe that you know how to understand the sign. If you have such a reason you can proceed from the sign-post without doubt. Without such a reason there will be nothing conclusive within your mind, that you are reading the sign-post correctly, and doubt as to how to read the sign will be pervasive.
Now let's say that you have good reason to believe that you know how to read this type of sign correctly, you have much experience with this type of sign. You assume that your understanding of this sign, under "normal circumstances" gives you no reason to doubt. But what if the person who posted the sign doesn't follow the same conventions as you, and planted the sign in a backward way, or the sign has been tampered with as you allude to as a possibility, making the circumstances "not normal". If you approach these signs with the certainty that you know how to read this type of sign correctly, you will not doubt your capacity, and you will not notice that the circumstances are abnormal, until after you make your mistake. If you approach these signs with uncertainty, doubt, then the probability that you will notice an abnormal situation will be greatly increased.
The possibility of a "not-normal" situation creates the possibility of a mistake in understanding. The goal is to avoid mistakes in understanding. This requires that we doubt the normalcy of every situation. If we are inclined to assume that the situation is normal, because there is a high probability that the situation will be normal, and therefore we do not doubt the normalcy of the situation in each instance, then when the improbable "not normal" situation occurs, it will slip past our attention and mistake will occur.
Have you ever worked in a factory with multiple levels of safety precautions? You would think that one simple form of safety precaution would be adequate. But no, we tend to let down our guard with respect to one level of safety precaution, assuming to be certain that we would apprehend the not-normal circumstance, and a mistake would not be made, and so the second level of safety precaution is required to save us when we fail to apprehend the not normal situation.
Ok. How does that work out for you? Ever make a mistake?
What sort of a reason?
I make lots of mistakes, that's not really relevant except to show that doubt is always called for. The point is that Wittgenstein's epistemology is incoherent. His ontology of rules necessitates doubt. There cannot be absolute certainty in understanding, he excludes Ideals, rendering absolute certainty as impossible. Then he proceeds in his epistemology as if there could be a situation which leaves no room for doubt. He seeks to ground his epistemology in the Ideal (the exclusion of doubt) which he has already designated as impossible.
When the absolute is excluded, then certainty can only be a function of probability. We can name some arbitrary degree of probability, and claim that at this level of probability doubt is excluded, but this claim that doubt is excluded at this arbitrary level, cannot be justified because of that arbitrariness. The arbitrary level of probability could be one in a thousand, one in a million, whatever; and we could take each lottery ticket, and claim that without a doubt this ticket is a loser, but at the end of the day, one of the tickets wins, so those claims are not justified.
The point being that the exclusion of doubt is inherently incompatible with Wittgenstein's ontology. That's why he's "written a great fat book going into it in exhaustive detail from every possible angle with many many examples". He's trying to do the impossible, and he could continue that great fat book to infinite fatness without success. Not even the principle of plenitude could save him because instead of leaving absolute certainty as a possibility, he has denied it as impossible.
As I said above, I have no problem with this ontology, I think it's strong. But we need to accept the ramifications, and principally this is that doubt cannot be excluded. Consider doubt to be a natural product of the physical constitution of the human being; that physical constitution disallows the possibility of absolute certainty, therefore the claim that doubt can be excluded cannot be justified.
Quoting Luke
Any reason. You might think, I've seen this type of sign before, and I've learned what it means, therefore I know what this one means. You might think, someone has explained to me this type of sign, and told me what it means, therefore I know what this one means. Perhaps your reason is even some sort of superstition, or intuition. The point is that having a reason quells your doubt, allowing you to decide, and proceed. But removing your doubt with respect to the meaning of the sign, no matter what the reason is, does not justify the claim that there is now no room for doubt.
Well no. When the absolute is excluded, and when one acknowledges that this includes absolute doubt as well as absolute knowledge, something we seem to disagree about, then certainty becomes a matter of psychology, of the attitude one takes, the questions one does and does not ask, of the behaviour of the person in relation to things. One can always make room for doubt, but if one does always make room for doubt, then one ends up with no room for anything else. Therefore, demand reasons to believe and reasons to doubt equally, that thy days may be long in the land.
I don't know what you would mean by "absolute doubt". To me, an absolute is an ideal, and the ideal is "certainty", and certainty excludes doubt. So "absolute doubt" appears contradictory. In the context of absolutes, doubt is relative, relative to certainty which is the ideal, the absolute. "Absolute doubt" would be like "absolute evil". In the context of absolutes, "good" is the ideal, the absolute, and "evil" only has meaning insofar as something is deficient in relation to that absolute. But it would be contradictory to make "evil" the absolute because this would make it equivalent to "good", both being the absolute.
So the question for you. If we exclude the ideal, "certainty" from being the absolute, deny that certainty is absolute, doesn't this open the door to doubt as the absolute? The issue being whether or not an absolute is necessary. Wittgenstein denies the ideal, "certainty", but can he deny the absolute? If not, then the absolute may be what is left by the exclusion of certainty, and that is doubt. So "absolute doubt" is very real if we cannot dispose of the need for an absolute.
No. If I am certain, I have no doubt. If I am doubtful, I am uncertain. But since these are both frames of mind, I don't even know what it might mean for them to be absolute.
The point is that having a reason quells your doubt, but removing your doubt does not remove doubt?
I suppose that if you could exclude all doubt from your mind, you would have absolute certainty. I do not think that this is humanly possible. You mentioned "absolute doubt", so I assume that this would be to exclude all certainty. Why would absolute doubt be a bad thing? An attitude, or "frame of mind" of doubt does not prevent you from proceeding, it simply produces a cautious attitude toward procedures, with due respect for the possibility of mistake. While certitude produces a careless attitude toward procedures, because it inclines disrespect for the possibility of mistake. It appears to me, that to exclude the attitude of certainty (absolute doubt), would be a good thing.
Quoting Luke
I would think that having a reason, or reasons, might quell your doubt to the point where you might proceed based on probability. But since a complete removal of doubt is unjustified, you ought not proceed as if you have no doubt at all.
If I’m not misunderstanding:
For what I’ve so far read it seems to me that doubt has mostly been equated to uncertainty; a very common practice which, if I’m correct, is an improper definition of doubt.
As per common usage, if Ted is simply interested in learning more about the properties of X, he does not hold certainty about those properties of X he wishes to learn more about--and is thereby, technically, uncertain about those properties of X he wishes to discover. (We can only be curious about things we are not fully certain about psychologically). However, in this scenario, Ted cannot be validly stated to doubt X’s properties. (Curiosity does not entail doubt for that which one is curious about.) Else: not being omniscient, we are all to some extent uncertain about what the future holds; however, this of itself does not entail that we doubt the specifics of what the future holds.
A hypothesis that I belief to be correct: Doubt is an uncertainty about some previously held certainty, be it one’s own or others, be this held certainty psychological or epistemic. For example:
If I were to claim that the future holds attribute A, and were you to be uncertain that my belief (held beliefs are always held psychological certainties) is valid, then you would doubt that the future holds property A. But without me, you, or anyone else purporting specifics about the future, there would be nothing to doubt about the future—even though one would yet remain uncertain about the future’s specifics.
Doubt demolishes a previously held certainty by making it one credible alternative among rivaling others (not by proving it false). Doubt is one form of uncertainty. But uncertainty in general does not entail doubts:
All enquiry, learning, curiosity, sense of wonder (and maybe some others) require an uncertainty about what if fact is—none entail doubt for that enquired into, learned, wondered upon, and so on.
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In what I believe to be agreement with your general sentiment, I do contend that one can well subsist with an acknowledgment that no such thing as infallible/absolute certainty can be obtained. And that belief that infallible certainties can be obtained is untenable.
Still, to hold any form of uncertainty—including that of doubt—one must first hold a psychological certainty that some contextually relevant given is real/true. E.g., to be uncertain about whether one forgot a cup on a table, I must first hold a psychological certainty that there is a reality/truth to whether or not the cup is presently on the table, that there in fact is a table, and so forth.
So uncertainty cannot hold an absolute psychological presence (much less can doubt). The aforementioned instead results in the position of fallibilism*, such that less than infallible certainties of various strengths are maintained till evidenced wrong (with acknowledgment that all of one's certainties are to some extent fallible).
*Which to my mind is validly equivalent to non-Cartesian forms of global skepticism (as in “thoughtful; enquiring”) Global doubt is that pursued by Cartesian skepticism, and this only in the hopes of arriving at infallible certainties that are thereby indubitable.
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p.s., haven't read much of Witt
This is peculiar. As if doubt is some ubiquitous and penetrating miasma that will infect any mind not entirely closed. As if, as I open my front door, I am in some doubt as to whether the street will be outside. No, no, no. I don't in the least doubt as i spoon the instant from the jar into the cup, that when the water is added it will taste a bit like coffee, only not as nice, that the precipitation I see through the window is water and not gin, unfortunately, I don't have to grit my teeth and not think of bizarre improbabilities with great difficulty. I am certain of these things. One cannot live in universal doubt, because there simply isn't time. I could conceivably doubt any of these things, but I couldn't conceivably doubt everything - that is the philosopher's fiction, because one would have to doubt that the words mean what one thinks they mean and so whether one's doubt itself is something or nothing. I rest in the certainty that I am talking sense and folks can understand me, that folks are going to read this and get the meaning. I have no doubt of it, though I dare say I could imagine a scenario in which it would not be so.
My partner is like this when it comes to arithmetic. She starts a calculation, but never quite believes the result she gets and has to go back a check it, and double-check. And by then she has lost her place in the original problem and has to start again. It's a debilitating affliction, not a philosophy.
I cannot understand this. I've seen similar statements, by many different people, and no one has been able to justify this claim for me. Why must there be a foundation of certainty? If reality consists of possibilities, then we face reality in terms of probability. And, we create certainty within our minds, by excluding things as impossible. Necessary is equivalent to impossible to be otherwise. But as I've been explaining to unenlightened, there is a fundamental inconsistency between probabilities and impossible. Any impossibility created through probability is not a true impossibility, as the principle of plenitude indicates.
Further, the threat of infinite regress of doubt is not a problem. Infinite regress is simply repugnant to the mind which seeks to understand, as is doubt. So an infinite regress of doubt is not at all inconsistent.
So maybe you can explain to me what the others have not been able to. Why must there be an underlying psychological certainty? Take your example. I've lost my cup. I think, perhaps I left it on the kitchen table. Why must I be certain that there is a kitchen table, to consider this possibility? Suppose my memory is quite bad, and I'm confused perhaps by illness, can I not at the same time consider as a possibility that I do not even have a kitchen table? Maybe I sold the kitchen table last week, or moved into a new place without a table. Where comes the need for an underlying certainty?
Quoting unenlightened
This is exactly the point. Are you certain that the words mean what you think they mean? With Wittgenstein's position, there are possibilities as to the meanings of the words. I approach your words assuming that there is inexactness in my understanding of how you are using those words. Therefore I cannot exclude the possibility that I misunderstand what you are saying. The certitude you express in your examples, I am certain of this, and I am certain of that, is really irrelevant, because the goal here is to determine whether this certitude is justified. I think that from Wittgenstein's perspective, his ontology of rules, this internal certitude which you cannot be justified. Therefore you ought not claim to be certain about the things you claim to be certain about.
Quoting unenlightened
That's a matter of opinion. As you said in the last post, doubt is a frame of mind. When you develop the attitude, that all the things which you might otherwise claim to be certain of, (such as the things you list), might not actually be as you think they are, this does not impede your life. You may simply live your life in the same way as one who claims to be certain, yet recognizing that certainty is an illusion, it's not real. All it does is give you a different world view, the view that we may have a fundamental misunderstanding about the way that the world is, and therefore certainty is unjustified. This does not impede one's daily life.
We live in a society with a foundation in Platonic idealism, and that idealism supports the belief in certainty. Because of this, we have an attitude of certainty. You claim "I am certain", because that's your attitude, you tend to use those words in that way. Wittgenstein demonstrates that these ideals ought to be removed, they are not supported by a real description of language. if this is the case, then we can conclude that the attitude of certainty, and the tendency to say "I am certain" is a statement of falsity created by the illusion of idealism. Removing the attitude of certitude does not incapacitate one's ability to act. It just produces a more realistic description of human actions, and that is that we act without being certain. And when you state "I am certain that...", it is not a statement which is consistent with the possibilities of the human condition, it's a falsity, a self-deception.
I was talking about my wife, and she agrees with me. You can say it's a matter of opinion, but that too is a matter of opinion, and your opinion is worth rather little on this occasion, not having met the lady. What is not a matter of opinion?
Now one might invent a situation in which it is possible that I am mistaken about these things, but the more serious and sinister mistake is the philosophical mistake that because such a thing is possible that anything that follows from it disrupts the certainty with which we live and act and think and speak. Descartes' Archimedean point of indubitability is a philosophical illusion.
You should ask yourself this question, given that you are the one making claims of radical doubt. Are you certain that your words mean what you think they mean? According to you, you cannot be certain what the word "doubt" (or any other word) means, so how can you maintain your argument?
I consider this to be contradictory. If certainty is not indubitable, necessary, or infallible, then how is it "certainty"? What is the point in saying "I am certain", unless you truly believe that the thing you are supposedly certain of, is indubitable, necessary, or infallible? You could only be using "certain" as a means of deception. As unenlightened described, to be certain is a frame of mind, I would call it a confidence. If we accept Wittgenstein's ontology of rules, then we ought to face the consequences, that such an attitude of confidence is unjustified, as I explained to unenlightened. This is the point, and why I insist Wittgenstein's epistemology is incoherent. You could use "certain" in another way, as Wittgenstein tries in On Certainty, but what would be the point of that?
Why not just say "I am sitting here typing this", and "I have read On Certainty". What does "I am certain" add to these phrases other than an unwarranted air of confidence?
Quoting Fooloso4
Of course it disrupts the certainty with which we act, that's the whole point. If you are fully aware that there is a possibility of mistake in your actions, how is it at all logical for you to proceed with certainty? But as I explained, this does not impede our capacity to act. We will still proceed in actions, only without the unwarranted air of confidence. This is not a "sinister mistake", it is the virtue of prudence.
Quoting Luke
Just let me be clear here. This "radical doubt" as you call it, is the consequence of Wittgenstein's ontology of rules. I am explaining how this form of doubt is the consequence of his ontology. I am not necessarily supporting this ontology, but it appears to be very forceful, and I see no good reason yet, to reject it. If you believe that this so-called radical doubt, which comes as the logical consequence of this ontology is reason to reject the ontology, then you might reject it. I do not judge ontology in this way. If the ontology is based in good solid principles, I'll accept it and allow the epistemological consequences to follow.
Quoting Luke
No, I am never certain that my words mean what I think they mean. I have a dictionary beside me which I use incessantly, attempting to find words to fulfil my purpose. I don't even know how I could judge whether I am certain of such a thing, because the words have families of meanings, as Wittgenstein describes. Therefore there is no such thing as the meaning of the word that I am using, only numerous possibilities for meaning. So how could there even be such a thing as what I think the word means, when I see the word as numerous possibilities for meaning? Therefore, I try very hard to make a conscious effort to bear in mind, every time that I print words on the page, or speak words, the possibility that people will misunderstand me, so I choose my words in a deliberate way, hoping to avoid such misunderstanding.
Quoting Luke
I don't see a matter of maintaining an argument here. We have a description, from Wittgenstein, of the nature of using words and language. The description is that there is no precise, exact, ideal, meaning to the words, a word indicates an area of possible meanings, like "stand roughly here" indicates an area of possible places to stand. Either you agree with this description or you do not. If you agree, with this, then we can proceed into the epistemology of doubt which follows from the nature of possibility. But if you do not, then there is no point, simply reject Wittgenstein's ontology of rules.
Firstly, it isn't a consequence of Wittgenstein's ontology or position; it is only your misreading.
Secondly, you were presenting radical doubt as your own view on the previous page when you said that you do not accept that doubting requires an underlying level of certainty.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Never? Rubbish.
If that were the case then it would be senseless for me to carry on talking to you since you aren't sure of anything that you're saying. Ever. This is different from using a dictionary "incessantly" because you're unsure of the occasional word. Do you rely on your dictionary for every word? Ridiculous.
That is how we use the term. The demand that it must mean more prohibits its use.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
? The rules of grammar according to W. are arbitrary.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That depends on what you think stands as justification. See the discussions of the river banks of knowledge, hinges, and his call for a step like that of relativity in On Certainty. See also what he says about groundlessness. It is not incoherent it describes what terms such as certainty and knowledge actually mean based on their use. Consider scientific knowledge. It does not establish eternal, unchanging truths. It represents how we understand things at present, and that will change over time.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What makes you think it is unwarranted? Generally I would not say that I am certain of these things unless some doubt is raised.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Really? If you doubt that you are reading this or that your fingers are moving or that their moving is part of your response to what I have said then why do it? Or that is not the right question because you cannot even be certain that you are doing it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Once again, the ability to doubt is not a reason to doubt.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That is because first you acted long before you were capable of doubting, and second, you do not take seriously the possibility that you might be deceived.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Prudence? Why be prudent? You cannot be certain that you should be or even what it means to be prudent.
I noticed you haven't participated in our discussion of this section of the book where doubt is discussed, so that claim is rather hollow.
Quoting Fooloso4
Speak for yourself. I wouldn't use "certainty" in such a deceptive way.
Quoting Fooloso4
Where did I say rules are arbitrary for W? They are like sign-posts, which one might understand, or misunderstand. Haven't you been following the book? Or are you like Luke, just joining in to add your two cents worth in some haphazard fashion, with no respect for what is written in the book?
Quoting Fooloso4
All this does is support my challenge, that Wittgenstein's epistemology is incoherent. He provides his own definition of objectively certain, in On Certainty, as excluding the possibility of mistake. Why would he provide a definition, then proceed to use certainty in some other way, unless equivocation was his intent?
Quoting Fooloso4
"I am certain that I am sitting here typing" adds nothing to the statement "I am sitting here typing", other than an air of confidence. The air of confidence is unwarranted, because the nature of possibility is such that you may not have used adequate words to describe the situation, therefore misunderstanding cannot be ruled out as impossible, even if it is highly improbable.
Quoting Fooloso4
That you can act, and put words to your actions, does not mean that you understand what you are doing. I really doubt that you even know what it means for a human being to be doing something, let alone understand what a human being is actually doing.
Quoting Fooloso4
Sure, but the possibility of mistake is reason to doubt. I went through this with unenlightened. Each lottery ticket is highly probable to be a loser. However there is still a possibility that it is a winner. Therefore we have reason to doubt that it is a loser, so we verify the numbers. You might insist that it is unreasonable to buy a ticket, but if someone gives you one, it is not unreasonable to verify the numbers. That is because no matter how improbable, it is still reasonable to doubt, because the improbable thing is still possible.
I’m in agreement with this.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The leading implicit (psychological) certainty in this hypothetical is that “I’ve lost my cup”. Devoid of this certainty, how would doubts as to where it might be begin manifesting?
I’ll do my best to summarize my position. Both certainty and uncertainty (but not doubt) can be linguistically applied to either a) ontology or b) epistemology. Emotive reasons for such statements aside, when it is said, “It is certain that the planet Earth is not flat,” one here affirms, what I’ll term, an ontic certainty: a determinate state of affairs that thereby holds no alternative possibilities. In contrast, when one says that, “I’m certain that planet Earth is not flat,” one here affirms, what I’ll term, a subjective certainty: a determinate state of mind pertaining to an awareness wherein this awareness deems that which its certain of to be the sole credible possibility, notably, regarding what is in fact ontically certain. Conversely, there are statements such as, “the future’s uncertain,” which can specify an ontic uncertainty: the indeterminate state of affairs that is found in the timespan we term the future. And: “I’m uncertain about the future,” which specifies a subjective uncertainty: an indeterminate state of mind wherein multiple credible alternatives compete for what in fact is the ontically certain (or determinate) state of affairs as it pertains to the future.
I’m hoping that the intelligibility of these four sentences here suffices in substantiating the validity of these two distinct categories of certainty and uncertainty: those which are ontic and those which are subjective.
Ontic certainties and uncertainties are not taken by us to be possibilities but, instead, to be factual states of being. These to me are fancy ways of re-expressing the concept of “is”—which isn’t a possibility but, in our cognition, an absolute. “The cup is on the table” doesn’t express a probability but a fact, which, as facts go, are taken by us to be absolute/total/complete actualities (in so far as they are not mere possibility, or mere potential regarding being). Extreme scenario: the stance that there are no ontic certainties is itself cognized, however implicitly, as depicting that which is ontically certain, thereby resulting in contradiction (hence, an error of reasoning). We think in terms of ontic certainties. A tangential: all ontic uncertainties (i.e., indeterminate states of affairs), if they factually hold presence, shall themselves be ontically certain; e.g. that the future is uncertain, if it is factually so, will itself be a(n ontic) certainty. Otherwise, we couldn’t claim that ontic uncertainties / indeterminate states of affairs factually occur/are.
All subjective certainties (including both psychological and epistemic) will hold some ontic certainty as referent. E.g., if one is certain that planet Earth is not flat one will hold this affirmation to adequately depict that which is ontically certain (or, that which is a determinate state of affairs). The clincher is that no known subjective certainty can be infallible in what it upholds to be ontically certain—but this here seems to be an aside.
With this as general background:
All subjective uncertainties (of which doubt is a type) will likewise be about some given state of affairs, about something which in fact is. This given or set of gives one is uncertain or doubtful about, however, shall itself be subordinate to a subjective certainty (which upholds a referenced ontic certainty): namely, that there is a determinate state of affairs (an ontic certainty) to the subject matter one is uncertain or doubtful about. Devoid of our subjective certainty that there is a relevant, underlying ontic certainty to be discovered, states of uncertainty and doubt become meaningless. This last sentence might be the hardest point to convey given your stances so far, but, as an example: if I am uncertainty/doubtful about whether or not the cup is on the table (or anything else), I already hold a certainty that some cognitive possibility that is conceivable adequately depicts that which is ontically certain regarding this matter. It’s just that I can’t figure out which of the multiple cognitive possibilities I’m pondering this one cognitive possibility is (this for as long as I remain uncertainty/doubtful). Devoid of this underlying subjective certainty that some relevant ontic certainty holds presence, uncertainty and doubt would again not be possible—the multiple alternatives that go through my mind would then not be competing for what in fact is (each, instead, then being its own stable reality, even if they are contradictory to each other).
More briefly, one must first be certain that something is in fact the case in order to be uncertain or in doubt about what the case might in fact be.
Going by the aforementioned, the conclusion is that no subjective uncertainty (including that of doubt) is possible in the complete absence of all subjective certainty. (To me related: also, no ontic uncertainty is possible where it’s presence to not be ontically certain—and, thus, and ontic certainty). Hence, the presence of uncertainty is always subordinate to the presence of certainty.
I’ve condensed my views a lot in this post. Won’t be surprised if there happens to be lack of clarity in what I’ve written. But, if so, point out the pertinent areas where I’ve been less than sufficiently clear.
I think it is no longer worth my time and effort trying to help you see more than your myopic vision allows. It is one thing to discuss the texts but quite another when you resort to personal insult.
I don't see how you can make a valid argument here. I'm doubting the location of my cup. But at the same time I might also be doubting if I even had a cup. I'm thinking where's my cup, and start looking, then right away, I realize that I might not have even gotten a cup in the first place. Now I'm wondering where is my cup, and looking for it, but I'm at the very same time wondering if I even have a cup. So I don't see how you can claim any necessary, underlying certainty. It's simply not there. We may proceed into action without certainty of what we are doing. Perhaps it's a function of habit. I want my coffee, so I proceed into looking for where I set it down, before I properly consider whether or not I even got a coffee yet. Proceeding into an habitual action is not a function of certainty.
Aristotle developed the position that knowledge always must lead from the more certain toward the less certain. This means that something with a higher degree of certainty always underlies and supports the thing with the lower degree of certainty. But now we're talking about doubt, and there is nothing to indicate that there must be certainty underlying doubt. We naturally doubt the less certain things first, but this may lead us to doubt the underlying things which are more certain. I doubt where the cup is, but this might lead me to doubt whether I even have a cup. And, when we find, as Wittgenstein demonstrates to us, that the meanings of the words which express our knowledge, are themselves dubitable, this justifies doubting the entire structure of knowledge.
Quoting javra
What is at question in the context of this thread, is the understanding of the phrase "the planet earth is not flat". There is no point to saying "I am certain that ...", until I am certain that I understand what "..." means. Certainty that the statement is true can only be supported by certainty that the statement is not misunderstood. If there are "alternative possibilities" to the meanings of these terms, "planet", "earth", "flat", as Wittgenstein explains that there are possibilities for meaning, then we need to assess the certainty we have with respect to the meaning of the phrase. If I cannot say with certainty, that I know what "the planet earth is not flat" means, then I cannot proceed to have any certainty about whether the statement is true or false.
Quoting javra
This appears to be fundamentally untrue. We can proceed with doubt as to whether or not such certainty is possible to obtain. This doubt does not prevent us from proceeding. I do not need certainty that I will win the game, before I proceed into playing the game. I do not even need to be certain that winning is possible before I proceed. And, we might never know until after we proceed, whether or not such certainty is possible. Perhaps certainty is impossible, but we do not know that it is impossible, we might never know whether it's possible or not until we attempt to obtain it.
Quoting javra
So what is at issue here is what is meant by "the cup is on the table". We cannot proceed to discuss whether it is certain or not, that this is true, until we are certain of the meaning of the phrase. Since there are a number of possibilities for meaning, then any determination of the meaning of this phrase, whether it is the intended meaning, really is a matter of probability.
Quoting javra
This is a fundamental misrepresentation. One can be uncertain, and in doubt, without even knowing "what the case is" means. So you are assuming that one must know what "what the case is" means, prior to having doubt about what is the case. But that's irrelevant, because the person can still be uncertain and doubtful about what is going on, without even knowing what "what the case is" means. Sure, the person would not be doubting what "is in fact the case", but the person would still be doubting and uncertain. Therefore one does not need to be "certain that something is in fact the case", in order to be doubtful of one's knowledge of the situation.
Quoting Fooloso4
I apologize for classing you with Luke, or any other thing which you may have apprehended as an insult. Insult was not my intention. But it's very frustrating for me, with a sincere desire to discuss the text, to have people showing no indication that they have even read the section in question, insinuating that I have misunderstood what Wittgenstein has said. Only unenlightened has actually engaged me on the basis of the terms in the text. The issue was whether or not Wittgenstein's appeal to "ordinary circumstances" (87), is sufficient to "leave no room for doubt" (85).
Let me make it clear: you have misunderstood Wittgenstein.
The third edition has it as "leave no room for doubt", but the fourth edition has it as "leave room for doubt" (at §85).
But what would I know, since I didn't participate in a part of the discussion. :roll:
I'll have one more go with you Meta, as all my other threads are full of trolls at the moment. if you ask a non philosopher to look out of my window and say what they see, they will tell you, "A tree".
'Are you sure?'
"Of course I'm sure, I know what a tree looks like."
"But are you absolutely certain?"
"Do you think I''m daft or something"
Traditionally, philosophers have decided that this man is wrong, and have pointed out to him that in a desert the might be mirages of trees, that someone might have painted an image of a tree on the glass or projected an image onto a cloth, or indeed, that he might be daft. Let's call these 'special circumstances'.
And why cannot one reply, that all these things might be, but happen not to be?
Look at what the philosopher is doing. How has he discovered that these special circumstances exist at all? How has he discovered that one can be deceived? It is not by some complex argument or power of reason, but in exactly the same way as the non-philosopher, by going about the world, and coming across these special circumstances, and learning to recognise them in exactly the same way that he learns to recognise a tree. There is no other way. Are you sure there can be special circumstances? Are you sure these illusions are illusions? Perhaps a painted tree is a real tree, perhaps a mirage is a real oasis, why is this more sure than anything else? Perhaps daft people see reality. The apparent sophistication of doubt turns out to have no firmer foundation than the naive certainty it replaces. The non philosopher was right in the first place:
"Do you think I'm daft or something? Nay lad, It's you that's got in a muddle from too much thinking."
To justify this assertion, you ought to address this section of the text, and show me where I've been mislead by Wittgenstein's words.
Quoting Luke
Good, this supports my claim that "leaves no room for doubt", is inconsistent with what Wittgenstein was trying to say. And, if he goes on to introduce epistemological principles in "On Certainty", where doubt may be excluded, that would be inconsistent with what he is saying here in PI.
Since you agree with me that he is saying that the rules, as sign-posts, leave room for doubt, then for what reasons do you not agree that his position is consistent with what I've described, what you've called "radical doubt"? This so-called "radical doubt" is the consequence of Wittgenstein's ontology of rules.
Quoting unenlightened
Thanks for the reassurance, I get the impression that the other two here have placed me in the troll category.
Quoting unenlightened
I would not agree with this statement. I think that the "special circumstances" are brought to light by the power of reason, and complex arguments. Suppose your example goes another way, suppose the person who is asking, differs from the person answering, and says "no that's not a tree, it's a shrub", and then produces of argument for that point of view. The person who claimed that it was a tree, and insisted on certainty, did not know of the special circumstances, without the power of reason and argument.
Remember the knights who are the keepers of the sacred word Ni? Living in a forest of trees, they want a shrubbery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYSMPjMVnAU
Each person gets set in one's own habits of seeing the world in a particular way, but the way that each of us sees it, is slightly different from each other. The "special circumstance" which is conducive to doubt, is the situation where we disagree. It's not by going out in the world, that we learn to recognize the special circumstances, it's by having them pointed out to us. Imagine people thousands of years ago. One person points out a rock to another and says look at this rock, I can put it in the fire and separate an element (gold) out from this rock. Until that point, the other person doesn't even see the rock as a special rock. Metaphysicians seek those special circumstances at the foundational level.
I think that this is what the capacity to understand language consists of, seeing every instance as a special instance. This is a fundamental reversal from the perspective of relating the sameness of the use of words, to say that each word has "a meaning". Meaning is related to context, and every instance of usage has its own special context and therefore its own special meaning. The view that each word has "a meaning" is a mistaken view, because the meaning is peculiar to the context. This means that in the context of language usage, every instance is a special circumstance.
Consider what might happen when the context gets old, written material has aged for hundreds of years. Living in a different era now, we have great difficulty determining the meaning of old texts, because this requires putting ourselves in that context. This for example, is always a problem in interpreting religious texts, and has become a notable issue in the interpretation of the 2nd amendment of the USA.
Quoting unenlightened
The point is that there is no firm foundation. The shifting sands of time are what supports the theory of social collapse spoken of by Dr. Bendell in your other thread. Whether a "collapse" or a "shift" is unknown, but change is inevitable. Are you familiar with Kuhn's concept of paradigm shift? The paradigm shift is only made possible by a foundation which is not firm. Wittgenstein was no stranger to Kuhn.
We can argue about nomenclature, but it is a different kind of uncertainty entirely, and one that W. also goes into exhaustively. Why muddy the waters instead of dealing with the example given, and the special circumstances given?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yeah language can become divorced from context and so meaning can become less clear and certain.
But again you are not dealing with the challenge but posing a different language problem. Deal with the tree, or the shrub if you want to call it a shrub. Deal with the source of the uncertainty of its being, not the uncertainty of its name. You seem to me to want to run to a linguistic confusion in order to avoid dealing with the argument.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, that's not the point. You missed the point by blowing linguistic smoke. Foundations are set into the ground and so they are grounded. The green thing growing outside my window is a green thing growing outside my window and there is no uncertainty, no doubt about it, whatever language we speak. Any uncertainty one might suggest requires the same certainty that is being undermined - the special circumstances that don't, as it happens, apply.
I could but what would be the point? Despite your talk of uncertainly you seem certain that you have understood Wittgenstein, and that his epistemology is incoherent, and that those who do not agree with you have not been paying sufficient attention.
Has it not occurred to you that Wittgenstein only appears to be incoherent to you because you have not understood him?
The irony is that you have not "been mislead by Wittgenstein's words". It is not the words that are misleading. Like the signpost, someone can always interpret it in the wrong way, but that is not the fault of the signpost.
When I come to stop sign I do not wait for a go sign to appear before proceeding. There is no room for doubt, but someone who does not know what a stop sign is might never go any further once he has seen "stop".
Not really, because in the very next sentence of §85 - which is unchanged in both the third and fourth editions - W says: "Or rather, it sometimes leaves room for doubt, and sometimes not." You've willfully ignored this sentence for the last few pages of this discussion, and built your 'incoherent epistemology' thesis around the claim that W says "leaves no room for doubt" (only).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, he says at §85 that "it sometimes leaves room for doubt and sometimes not". At §84, he states:
This is Wittgenstein's view, which is what everyone here has been trying to tell you.
§85 is a prelude to the later passages on rule following, including §201 ("there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation").
Doubt (as we are addressing it) is a conscious activity. Do we agree?
So, when doubting the location of the cup, can one simultaneously doubt that one is doubting, and furthermore doubt that one is in doubt about one's doubting of where the cup is, and this in infinite regress, at a level of momentary conscious awareness? If not, one will be psychologically certain that one is in doubt at the moment one is in doubt. Thereby making global doubt a psychological impossibility.
That one can doubt everything more or less sequentially if one wants (fist doubting this then doubting that) does not imply a global doubt (one that is fully devoid of any momentary certainty) ... unless one equivocates between infallible/absolute/indubitable subjective certainty and regular subjective certainty as it is commonly understood. But, then, if by "global doubt" one intends to express the held psychological certainty that there are no infallible certainties, this would in itself be a position one is certain about - and this, of itself, contradicts the position of global doubt.
I'm trying to address extremes since less extreme examples don't appear to be convincing to you.
As to the rest of your arguments, I noticed that they revolve around the issues of what words mean. As I previously mentioned, I have not read much of Wittgenstein. Started reading On Certainty but then lost interest. So I'll abstain from arguing these issues in general. I will make the observation that we cannot help from being momentarily certain of what we mean by the words we express to convey our meaning. Otherwise, why would any words be expressed by us?
?88
Wittgenstien was an engineer. This mechanical metaphor is worth paying attention to. The engine only does work when the clutch is engaged; language only does work when it engages with the other stuff we are doing; when it is part of our lives.
The doubt posited by @Metaphysician Undercover does not engage with the world; indeed it serves to sever that connection. So it makes it impossible to discuss @unenlightened's tree.
Notice that engaging the clutch does not stop the engine; it just sits there spinning away - not unlike @Metaphysician Undercover, with whom I and others have had this discussion many times over the years.
In the end one must re-engage the clutch and move on.
My favourite reply to the recurrent thread "What is time?" is "I'll tell you later".
Sometimes this is the only way to answer a question. The specific gravity of hydrogen is 0.0696. The answer can be said. That's not the way one can answer a question such as "What is time?"; one knows what time is, but it cannot be said, it can only be shown.
Rabbits and ducks. But they're further on up the road.
It's also the source of a game I sometimes play here, in which a thread is built by players taking it in turns to add a rule.
A game I take to have profound philosophical significance, but which is usually shuffled off to the social sections of the forum.
Here he is setting out the core of his new philosophical method, in which philosophical discussion is "taken apart"; Philosophy treats "Misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused, among other things, by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of language."
Yes. It does nicely show that a (system of) rule( s ) can be followed regardless of whatever mutations they may later develop. Though playing the game is mostly disregarding others' stated rules just to posit your own, which is where the fun is in the game when no one is taking it so seriously.
Though saying that some things can only be shown is still saying things, gesturing towards them is still saying things - as if words could not show -, 'going out to look', so to speak, can still inspire good writing and precise description.
Relegating things to the background isn't a universal acid for philosophical problems; if anything the widespread application of the strategy displays a deaf ear for the 'grammar' of the problems thus consigned to the dustbin. There's no need to throw away the well posed questions and relevant/topical analysis of them along with the mistakes.
Edit: though, this would derail the thread if we pursued it. If you can be bothered the discussion might be worth another thread.
In the Tractatus Wittgenstein replaces Kant's transcendental conditions of the possibility of phenomena, that is, mental representation, with the transcendental conditions of logic and ethics/aesthetics. Here he drops all talk of transcendental conditions.
By way of explanation he says:
And:
It feels like we need to be exact; and this underpinned the approach of the older text. But keep in mind the previous discussion of exactitude.
(edit: I'm reading the voice here as of a protagonist, not the main thread. He is setting up being exact about our language in order to show that it would be an error..)
The Ontology of Linguistic Meaning
"The essence is hidden from us"
:grin:
Just so I don't have to look it up again...
SO it can't be the thinking that makes it so; nor the being so that makes us think...
But all we have are ordinary words. Our desire for profundity is undone by the banality of language...
§98 ...our everyday language suits us just fine; putting the lie to the notion of a perfectly ordered language...
§99 ...and we find that we do not need such a perfect order; bringing us back tot he argument in §88: "Stand roughy there".
§100 A game does not need set rules. We can make them up as we go, or change them as we see fit. Language is, if you like, the ultimate game. There need be no perfect analysis, no crystal core.
I'm reading the "we" in these texts as Wittgenstein's interlocutor, the chap to whom he is explaining an error. "We" comes close to being the early Wittgenstein, but is a bit more general.
We want logic to be perfect; but we can't see how, nor why.
§102 Logic appears to be a part of the background within which language takes place...
§103 ...and we cannot do language without it...
§104 ...we try to talk about it, and find ourselves using words (we predicate what lies in our method of representation)...
§105 ...and in using words about words we find ourselves trapped...
§106 ...and the solution is not to be more subtle but to keep to the everyday...
§107 ...to keep our words in contact (friction) with their everyday use (compare keeping the clutch engaged on an engine) because...
§108 ...language does not have the formal unity that was imagined.
We must keep ourselves using our ordinary words. But perhaps what philosophers do is ask about how the game is set up (chess).
And hence to the method described in §109, in which an examination of language leads to the recognition of philosophical problems as a "bewitchment" by language.
It is not that we choose a logic, as if it is out there existing on its own. The rules of a language game, like the rules of other games, is determined, so to speak, by playing it. The grammar does not come first, to be followed by application or use. The grammar develops and changes as the game is played.
I am not the one muddying the waters, nomenclature is what is at issue here. The rule stands like a sign-post. The words, as sign-posts, are themselves, the "rules" for understanding themselves. The question is whether we can remove the possibility of misunderstanding the words, and thereby remove doubt.
Quoting unenlightened
The problem is this. One cannot proceed to judge the certainty of the truth or falsity of the statement "that is a tree", until one has certainty with respect to the meaning of the word "tree". Certainty of meaning underlies certainty of truth or falsity. If there is no certainty of the meaning, there can be no certainty as to truth or falsity of the statement. Wittgenstein is questioning the certainty we have in relation to what the words mean, at 87 specifically, whether or not an explanation is needed to avoid misunderstanding the words (sign-post). The doubt we are concerned with is doubt in relation to understanding or misunderstanding the sign-posts. The foundation of certainty is certainty of meaning, and there cannot be any certainty with respect to truth or falsity without certainty of meaning.
Wittgenstein's ontology removes the certainty of meaning, which is granted to us in an ontology like platonic realism, which asserts an objective, and independent meaning to the words as independent Forms. Assuming independent Forms can give us certainty that there is "the meaning" to the words, and we can base certainty that we understand 'the meaning" on this certainty. But if we deny that there is such as thing as "the meaning", which Wittgenstein does, then where do we base any certainty that we have understood, and not misunderstood the words?
Quoting Fooloso4
I wouldn't be inviting people to explain to me where I've gone wrong, if I was certain that I hadn't gone wrong. That's nonsense. I put that out there as a topic to be discussed, to see if someone else could provide the foundation which I believe Wittgenstein has not provided. Or, to show me where I've misunderstood the words which are supposed to provide the foundation, which I have not found.
Quoting Fooloso4
Right, that's my point isn't it? If there is the possibility that I might be interpreting the words in the wrong way, how do I remove the doubt I have in relation to my understanding?
Quoting Fooloso4
Another person might not even stop at the stop sign. So, when you proceed from the stop sign, after stopping, you ought to proceed with doubt, being aware of the possibility that another person may not stop. Being certain, I understand, and the other person misunderstands, doesn't protect you from the other person's folly of misunderstanding. Therefore the form of certainty which you are pushing for, is an unjustified certainty.
Quoting Luke
I haven't ignored this statement, that is the very quote I referred to when I started this discussion. My argument was, that according to Wittgenstein's ontology of rules, every situation leaves some degree of uncertainty, and therefore some room for doubt. He does not provide the premises required for the conclusion "sometimes there is no room for doubt".
Quoting Luke
I fully realize that this is "Wittgenstein's view". The question is whether his stated "view" is consistent with his description. His description is what I have called his ontology of rules, rules exist like sign-posts. His stated "view" is the foundation of his epistemology. If there is inconsistency between these two, as I have argued, then his epistemology is incoherent. So the question is whether we can proceed logically from his ontology, the description of rules existing as sign-posts, to his epistemology, his "view" that sometimes there is no room for doubt.
At 86 - 87 he proceeds to describe the need for explanation in order to exclude the possibility of misunderstanding the sign-post, the rule. It doesn't make sense to him, that we would always need an explanation to avoid doubt, because this would mean that the explanation would need an explanation, etc., resulting in infinite regress, then doubt could not be avoided. So his claim is that we only need an explanation if an explanation is necessary to avoid misunderstanding. And, therefore, the sign-post requires no further explanation if under "normal circumstances" it fulfills its purpose.
My argument is that to exclude doubt, to leave no room for doubt, requires that the possibility of misunderstanding be removed. So I can say that what is stated here, at 87 is insufficient for removing doubt.
"Whereas an explanation may indeed rest on another one that has been given, but none stands in need of another—unless we require it to prevent a misunderstanding."
What is needed to remove doubt, is to prevent the possibility of misunderstanding. Wittgenstein's statement here really makes no sense, because we often do not know whether or not there is a misunderstanding. In these cases we do not know whether misunderstanding has been prevented. So we do not know whether an explanation is needed or not. Therefore doubt is justified. But if Wittgenstein had made the necessary statement, "an explanation is needed when required to prevent the possibility of misunderstanding", this would not support his epistemological principle, that sometimes doubt can be removed. An explanation would always be needed to remove the possibility of misunderstanding, and an explanation of the explanation, etc.. If there is a possibility of misunderstanding, then doubt cannot be removed, no matter how low the probability of misunderstanding is.
The appropriate way for Wittgenstein to deal with the infinite regress of explanation which is required to remove the possibility of misunderstanding, is to accept the fact that doubt cannot be excluded. This simply means that we proceed in our activities without certainty. And, this thing which he attempts to do, establish the foundations for an epistemology in which doubt has been removed, and there is certainty, is impossible. His description of rules, as sign-posts, does not provide what is needed to remove doubt and provide certainty in any circumstances.
Quoting javra
No, I don't agree with that. I am closer to unenlightened's characterisation which has doubt and certainty as a frame of mind. It's an attitude, the way we approach things, which affects our conscious activities. Either way, the attitude of doubt, or the attitude of certainty, is cultured into our habitual ways of acting and thinking, such that it is not necessary to consciously choose to be certain or doubtful. However, I do agree that there are levels of certainty and doubt which are properly conscious certainties and doubts.
I did not understand you division between uncertainty, and doubt, but now I think I see it. You seem to be positioning uncertainty and certainty as frames of mind, attitudes, and then placing doubt as a conscious activity. Your argument appears to be that we cannot proceed into any activity without certainty, therefore the activity of doubting requires certainty. My argument is that we can and do proceed into activities without certainty, and this is evident in other animals which do not have the rational capacity to produce certainty, but still act.
But let me take your premise, that doubting is an activity, and see where it leads. Let's start with the assumption that animals may act (and this includes mental acts), without certainty. Do you agree that certainty comes into existence from rational activity? If so, wouldn't this rational activity which creates certainty be going on when the animal is uncertain. And wouldn't this be a form of doubt? Or, do you place certainty as some underlying attitude, which even animals without rational capacity have?
Quoting javra
As I said already, I see no inconsistency between doubt and infinite regress. Doubt is a feature of infinite regress. Doubt is inherent within infinite regress because infinite regress is a lack of resolution. So when one considers the possibility of infinite regress, that person is doubtful, and this does not mean that the person is actively thinking about an infinite number of different thoughts. This argument, that certainty must underlie doubt, or else there would be an infinite regress of doubt, is fundamentally flawed, because infinite regress is consistent with doubt. It is only certainty which requires the removal of infinite regress. If we cannot find the principles to remove the infinite regress, then doubt is what we have, as doubt is consistent with infinite regress, and therefore certainty is lost.
Quoting javra
This is just not true. One can hold a belief without being certain that what is believed is true. Faith and religion are based in this fact. We believe without certainty. So to believe that there are no infallible certainties does not require that one is certain about this. The opposite, what you've described, is blatant misrepresentation produced for the purpose of supporting your untenable epistemological position.
Quoting Banno
You mean disengaging the clutch don't you? If it is true that we need certainty with respect to our understanding of the sign-post before we proceed, as some here seem to be arguing, we'll sit here spinning away, forever. And, if we proceed on the premise that certainty can be produced without removing doubt, we proceed on a false premise. Equally false is the premise that doubt can be removed without removing the possibility of misunderstanding the sign-post. So, do we or do we not proceed on the premise that doubt cannot be removed from our interpretation of the sign-post, and therefore we are uncertain as to whether or not we are proceeding in the right direction?
So you agree that there is no uncertainty about there being a green growing thing that I can see through the window? Then my work here is done.
What I said, or at least meant to say is that my certainty of whether or not there is "a green growing thing that I can see through my window", is dependent on the certainty that I have an unmistakably correct understanding of what that phrase means. If I cannot be certain that my understanding of the phrase is not mistaken, then I cannot be certain as to whether or not the phrase is true. And, the belief that the rules for understanding are like sign-posts, leaves me in the position where I cannot be certain that I am not misunderstanding the meaning of the phrase. Therefore I cannot be certain whether or not the phrase is true, and so I do not agree that there is no uncertainty.
Well happily, I can confirm that there is not "a green growing thing that I can see though my window" anywhere except on my computer screen. The only phrase I can see though my window is "Coastal Mobility" which is written on the building opposite. But since you are not sure that you understand what I am talking about, I might as well stop talking. When you say 'phrase', I assume you mean 'tasty sausage', is that right?
For a curious example of analogies leading to misunderstanding, see @s's The mashed is the potato
You've almost got it, but "phrase" is different from "tasty sausage", so that's not quite it. Every time someone says "phrase", they mean to say "phrase". But every time someone says "phrase", they might not be using the word in the same way as another time. So how can you be certain of how the person is using "phrase" at any particular time? Look at Wittgenstein's example of "Moses".
But don't worry, I am certain even if you don't know what I mean. But you can't be certain that I almost got it, unless you know what I meant by what I said, and that it almost meant 'it' where it means what you said., or what you meant by what you said, whatever that was - nobody knows.
Have to confess I struggled to misunderstand that - something about the Irish, an Orange parade and mashing people ... sounded a bit racist.
Wittgenstein in no way attempts to "establish the foundations for an epistemology in which doubt has been removed". This type of foundational philosophical thinking is rejected by Wittgenstein, and is a way of thought he is attempting to subvert via his therapeutic writing. The next 40-50 passages in the text seek to disabuse the reader of thinking in these ideal terms. Most of us - philosophers and non-philosophers alike - proceed in many of our daily activities with certainty without the need for any perfect epistemological foundation.
Wittgenstein repeats his "view" at §87:
You could claim that Wittgenstein's therapeutic method has not worked for you and that you still crave the removal of every imaginable doubt. That's fine, but don't misread Wittgenstein to be providing a foundational philosophy which will help you with this.
Are you suggesting that they lead [i]me[/I] to misunderstanding or [i]others[/I]: those I'm critical of there? And what's this supposed misunderstanding?
I suggest you reread 85-87. It is all philosophical thinking, regardless of whether Wittgenstein says otherwise.
85: "the sign-post does after all leave no room for doubt. Or rather: it sometimes leaves room for doubt and sometimes not. And now this is no longer a philosophical proposition, but an empirical one."
The proposition that a sign-post sometimes leaves no room for doubt is not an empirical proposition, it's a philosophical proposition. The degree of doubt which an individual has, cannot be observed. empirically. And, the fact that an individual will proceed into an activity does not mean that the person does not have doubt concerning the success or failure of the activity. We often proceed into actions with doubt concerning the action's success. So we cannot use the empirical observation that the person is proceeding to act, to conclude that there is no doubt. This is a philosophical proposition made by Wittgenstein.
Further, the entirety of 87, discussing the need for explanation to avoid misunderstanding, along with the conclusion, "The sign-post is in order—if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose." is philosophical, and not empirical. The status of one's understanding, like the status of one's doubt cannot be empirically observed. And the judgement of whether something fulfils a purpose is not an empirical judgement because a purpose cannot be observed empirically, to determine whether the thing has fulfilled that purpose. So this quoted statement is clearly a philosophical proposition rather than empirical.
Therefore, if Wittgenstein proceeds to reject such philosophical thinking, then that is just more evidence of the incoherency of his position. The means by which he attempts to exclude doubt, is a philosophical argument, and a defective one at that. He really should not have ventured into that philosophical issue, and completely left aside the subject of doubt. It clearly is a philosophical subject, rather than an empirical subject, and his attempt to make it empirical is a failure. That his intent, in venturing into the subject of doubt, was to establish a foundation for an epistemology, is evident in On Certainty.
Quoting Luke
I agree with this, many people, myself included, often claim to be certain. That is our habitual way of talking which is derived from our background of platonic idealism. Platonic idealism provides the grounds for certainty, in independent Forms, and it is the principal ontology of Christianity so it is bedrock in our linguistic habits. The point is that if we adhere to Wittgenstein's principles, that rules are sign-posts, we ought to recognize that these claims of certainty are unjustifiable. This leaves us with two options, either we accept that we ought not claim certainty, because such claims are false under our ontological principles, or we reject Wittgenstein's principles, which may allow us to find a way to justify our claims of certainty in another form of ontology. The problem is in trying to maintain both, our claims of certainty, and W's ontology of rules, because they are inconsistent with each other.
No, certainly not. If you're going to publicly use what I said in my discussion, in this discussion, as an example of an alleged misunderstanding, then I'm going to publicly defend what I said there over here. At least unless you delete your comment here.
The irony is that the misunderstanding is your own.
First of all, let's be clear that it is not the case [i]universally[/I] or [i]in general[/I] that taking one way of using words and applying it in another situation leads to misunderstanding. But I don't doubt that it can, and that it does in some cases.
Second, my intention was not to suggest that meaning was a thing in the way that a potato is a thing. That's not the fault of my analogy, it's the fault of your misreading of it. My analogy was about the logical structure of the language. It was about a distinction between, say, an egg and a boiled egg. This can be expressed in predicate logic as P(x) and P(x, y).
The analogies just showed this in a more relatable way, with the use of familiar things, like potatoes and oranges, rather than jumping straight into a more abstract way of making the point. Clearly, you missed the point by a country mile, and naively thought that you could make an example of me here, and perhaps you even convinced yourself that I would let you get away with it.
I didn't say it wasn't philosophical thinking; I said it wasn't foundational philosophical thinking. See Foundationalism.
I'm not going to argue with you about whether to accept Platonic idealism, or whether to follow Wittgenstein in his rejection of this sort of foundationalism. But, of course, you should follow Wittgenstein. :grin:
In relation to what is said at 87, this statement is questionable.
Quoting Luke
I agree, but despite his claims that doubt can sometimes be excluded, he hasn't shown me any principles whereby we can actually expect to exclude doubt in relation to any of our knowledge. So his position, even though he may have claimed otherwise, seems to be very supportive of skepticism.
How so?
To remove doubt, we seek an explanation. But then the explanation requires an explanation, and unless it's the final one, it's as if the explanation is hung in the air. Wittgenstein prevents this possibility of infinite regress of doubt and explanation, by asserting that an explanation is only needed, "if required to prevent a misunderstanding".
That is the point I've been arguing. Notice that "to prevent a misunderstanding" implies that an explanation is needed any time misunderstanding is possible. If we cannot remove the possibility of misunderstanding, then an explanation is required. The nature of the rules for understanding, as Wittgenstein describes them as sign-posts, is such that there is always the possibility of misunderstanding the rule. That's the nature of a sign-post, as W describes. Therefore it appears like an explanation is required for everything, if we are to prevent the possibility of misunderstanding. Wittgenstein recognizes this problem in the following statement:
[quote=87]It may easily look as if every doubt merely revealed an existing gap
in the foundations; so that secure understanding is only possible if we
first doubt everything that can be doubted, and then remove all these
doubts.[/quote]
So he offers as a resolution, to eliminate that doubt, and secure the foundation, "The sign-post is in order—if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose." But this principle is completely impotent. for its intended purpose,
You don't mean that we literally choose a logic, do you? I think you mean it's as if we make a choice, because we think and speak and write in a way that is not fundamentally bound to any logic.
We choose a logic in the same way we choose the places of the pieces in a game of chess. We're not locked in. We might decide to play Chess960. Logic is about the rules of the game, but they are not crystalline.
No, it doesn't.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You added the word possible.
Following the rule, or not, is shown in the doing. If the actions are in accord with the rules, that will suffice; if the signpost leads us in the right direction, that is all that we require of it. There is no need to dig further; but moreover, digging further would be an error.
@Metaphysician Undercover, it's as if you were asking why the bishop only move diagonally, and wanting not an explanation from the history of the game, but a further rule within the game.
To those who accept the discussion made in PI, it's an absurd thing to do.
Again I'd suggest moving on, since there is no further way to convince Meta that it's a rabbit and a duck if he only sees the duck. The point must be taken as moot. As the conversation moves on, other points of disagreement will arise.
Hi Banno, I welcome your contribution to this little problem which seems to be mine only. Getting bored elsewhere?
Quoting Banno
Right, that's the point. To prevent misunderstanding, requires having measures in place to prevent it, every time misunderstanding is possible. This is implied by "prevent misunderstanding". If you wait until after misunderstanding occurs, and try to fix it at that time, then you haven't prevented misunderstanding. Wittgenstein seems to be trying to dodge this fact.
Quoting Banno
I agree, if by "right direction" you mean as Wittgenstein says, the sign-post (rule) fulfils its purpose. If it fulfils its purpose it has lead you in the right direction. However, the possibility that it will be misunderstood is very real, and that's when explanation is necessary.
Wittgenstein could have stopped there, accepting that the possibility of misunderstanding is very real. If epistemologists said to him, you have a problem because doubt arises from the possibility of misunderstanding, he could have just replied that doubt is a fact of life, if that's a problem for your epistemology, then deal with it. Thus he might provide us with some grounds for skepticism. However, Wittgenstein did not stop there. He seems to have become obsessed with the idea that doubt is some sort of problem, and proceeded in On Certainty, in an attempt to limit doubt in some foundationalist way. But why? If his description of rules is accurate, and the result is that propositions of doubt and skepticism are valid propositions, then so be it.
Quoting Banno
I don't see what you are saying. The rule is the sign-post. I see a sign-post, (rule) and I'm not certain that I understand what it is telling me. If I need other sign-posts to understand that sign-post, then the probability of misunderstanding likely increases. Also, infinite regress is possible. My best option might be to proceed in the direction that I think the sign-post is telling me, but without certainty, with some degree of doubt.
Quoting Banno
I think you have the roles reversed. I see the rabbit and the duck, skepticism and foundationalism. The problem is that to assume both is incoherent. If the sign-post (rule) is designed such that it will tell you both "I'm a duck", and "I'm a rabbit", then it's not a sign-post (rule) at all, because it's designed to confuse you. And when the purpose is to confuse you, we call that deception. We ought not allow so-called sign-posts, whose purpose is to deceive, fulfil their purpose.
The Wikipedia article defines Foundationalism thus: "Foundationalism is an attempt to respond to the regress problem of justification in epistemology. According to this argument, every proposition requires justification to support it, but any justification also needs to be justified itself. If this goes on ad infinitum, it is not clear how anything in the chain could be justified. Foundationalism holds that there are 'basic beliefs' which serve as foundations to anchor the rest of our beliefs."
The basic beliefs of foundationalism are the "final" explanations to which Wittgenstein refers here:
Wittgenstein's solution is to provide a circuit breaker to the regress. We don't need to justify every word or statement, as the regress problem would have it; we only need to provide an explanation in order to avoid a misunderstanding. Wittgenstein cuts off the regress near the surface level of language use, rather than at the foundation.
It is hard to see why you think that this is a foundationalist philosophy. There is no chain of justification ending at basic beliefs here: "none stands in need of another - unless we require it to avoid a misunderstanding".
You provided a quote from the end of §87:
Yes, it may easily look like that, HOWEVER....
That is, the signpost is in order if, under normal circumstances, no further explanation is required to avoid a misunderstanding. Conversely, we avoid a misunderstanding if, under normal circumstances, the signpost (or words used) fulfils its purpose.
Indeed.
If these sign-posts (rules) do not need further explanation, then they are foundational. You are simply calling them "surface level". Anyway, whether it's properly called foundational or surface level is irrelevant, the point is that whatever you call it, it doesn't succeed as an attempt to justify certainty.
Quoting Luke
There is a problem of infinite regress of explanation described by Wittgenstein at 87. Unless it is the "final" explanation, it is as if the explanation is just hanging in the air. He makes "an attempt to respond to the regress problem", as per your definition of foundationalism. The "none stands in need of another
- unless we require it to avoid a misunderstanding", represents that attempt. Call it surface level rather than foundational if you want.
The problem, as I just explained to Banno, is that to avoid misunderstanding requires that we eliminate the possibility of misunderstanding. (In On Certainty he describes objectively certain as logically excluding the possibility of mistake). Remember, what Wittgenstein is trying to curb is doubt, and doubt is induced by the possibility of misunderstanding. But, due to the nature of rules, having the characteristics of sign-posts, there is always a possibility of misunderstanding. Therefore an explanation would always be required to avoid the doubt incurred by the possibility of misunderstanding. So, Wittgenstein's attempt to avoid the infinite regress fails.
Quoting Luke
Right, I took this up with unenlightened already. How would one determine "normal circumstances" to know whether an explanation is required or not, to avoid misunderstanding. Further, how would you know whether or not the sign-post fulfilled its purpose, and avoided misunderstanding until after it is too late to avoid misunderstanding. This principle is completely impotent as an attempt at indicating when an explanation is or is not required. It amounts to stating "If there was normal circumstances, and the sign-post fulfilled its purpose, then misunderstanding was avoided". It tells us nothing about how to know when misunderstanding is probable, and therefore an explanation is required.
Quoting Banno
Misunderstanding, therefore explanation was required.
You simply repeat the interlocutor's concern at §87: "But then how does an explanation help me to understand, if, after all, it is not the final one? In that case the explanation is never completed; so I still don’t understand what he means, and never shall!”
Yet you fail to acknowledge or be satisfied by Wittgenstein's response.
I have no further interest in attempting to explain it.
Yes. The so-called interlocutor's concern is a concern which Wittgenstein had about his description of rules, or else he would not have brought it up as a concern. And, as I've explained, Wittgenstein's response to that concern is lame. It's inconsistent with his description. He may have been better off not to have broached the issue of doubt. It's an issue he was not prepared to deal with.
You complain that doubt can always remain; that we can always fall short of an exact understanding, but these are merely imagined possibilities. The logical result of this claim is that understanding (or exact understanding) is impossible.
Can you honestly state that there has never been an occasion on which you have understood a signpost or what someone tells you? Understanding signposts and what people say is both possible and actual - it happens every day.
So, what do you mean by exact understanding?
They are not imagined possibilities, they are what Wittgenstein describes. I believe what he describes, but if you think his description is imaginary, that's between you and him. Look at how he describes exactness at 88. The degree of exactness which we strive for, which is required, is relative to our purpose, the goal, what we are doing (his example of time is very good).
I think we should have the same attitude with respect to misunderstanding, and doubt. We should limit the possibility of misunderstanding (this is doubt, recognition of the possibility of misunderstanding), to the degree required for our purposes. Wittgenstein is rejecting the notion that we strive for "ideals". But if he posits "certainty', or "leaves no room for doubt", as what he is striving for, he is just being hypocritical. In this case he has made his goal an ideal, an absolute, and this is inconsistent with the way that he says we use words. We do not strive for ideals, we settle for what is required relative to the purpose at hand.
The "logical result", of "misunderstanding is possible" is not "understanding is impossible", and I don't know what you would mean by "exact understanding". The point is that we ought to limit the possibility of misunderstanding to a degree acceptable, relative to the situation. If the president of the USA has his finger on the nuclear button, there is a need to limit the possibility of misunderstanding to a high degree. When my wife gives me a list of items for the grocery store, I need to limit the possibility of misunderstanding to a lesser degree. But striving for certainty, in the sense of leaving no room for doubt, is nonsense in the context of PI. To strive for the ideal would actually defeat the purpose of the book.
Quoting Luke
This is judgement after the fact, it's irrelevant. What we are talking about is avoiding misunderstanding, preventing misunderstanding. We are talking about a judgement made by the person planting the sign-posts, prior to the act of reading the sign-posts. But I'll tell you one thing, the fact that understanding is possible, does not produce the logical conclusion that misunderstanding is impossible. You seem to be employing some bad logic.
This is a continuation of the problem he addresses in 81:
We do not need or employ a calculus according to definite rules in order to use language. We do not have to remove all doubt in order to understand.
The question in 87:
The questioner is misled into thinking that if anyone utters a sentence and means or understands it, he is thereby operating a calculus according to definite rules. Wittgenstein himself was misled in this way. In the Tractatus he assumed that language was built on names of simple objects and that underlying them was logic, that is, the rules by which objects are connected and propositions operate. It was an image of perfect clarity. But it was wrong.
Language does not require perfect clarity. It is not built on a fixed structure of logic or rules. Misunderstanding is always possible, but this does not mean that understanding is impossible. When misunderstanding arises we attempt to correct it by an explanation. That explanation too might be misunderstood. But this does not mean that an explanation that leads to understanding is not possible. We cannot, however, eliminate the possibility of misunderstanding. No matter how precise the language, no matter how hard one attempts to anticipate where someone might misunderstand what is said, there will be someone who does misunderstand it. This is simply the way things are.
I'm with you there. Now the question I've been asking is why does Wittgenstein appear to persist in this misguided objective, to find the principles which exclude the possibility of misunderstanding, in On Certainty? And even here, at 85, where he says that the sign-post "sometimes leaves room for doubt and sometimes not"? If he has determined here, that there are no such principles of certainty, no such logic which excludes the possibility of misunderstanding, underlying our language and knowledge, and that it was misguided or wrong to have assumed such, then why does he proceed in that text, On Certainty, as if he is seeking these principles? Do I completely misunderstand his intention in On Certainty, is he trying to give "certainty" a different meaning which does not consist of excluding the possibility of mistake? Or does he misunderstand the principles he has stated here, himself?
The point being that if there is a possibility of misunderstanding, then some degree of doubt is justified. Therefore doubt cannot be completely dismissed as irrational. But Wittgenstein appears to have a desire to completely dismiss doubt in some situations, as completely irrational in those situations, without completely excluding the possibility of misunderstanding in those situations, and this itself is irrational.
Is Wittgenstein putting forth a theory of foundationalism, of course not, but it seems to follow from many of his thoughts. Many philosophers have interpreted Wittgenstein in this way, but they're careful about how they frame the idea. There is no doubt, at least as I interpret Wittgenstein, that Moore's statements
do fall into a kind of foundational thinking. Whether a statement is foundational depends on the context, and in Moore's context, viz, "This is my hand," it is foundational.
He's not. He is not arguing that it is possible to eliminate doubt but that the role of certainty in our lives and language is not the certainty that Descartes and others sought.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Because sometimes we have no doubt when following the signpost but other times we might. That, he points out, is an empirical proposition. We might, for example, see a sign in symbols for the men's room and one for the ladies' room and there is no doubt which is which, but there might be a case where we are not sure how to read the sign. Here there is room for doubt. But if someone gives us an explanation of the symbols and we know what they mean then there is no longer room for doubt.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
He is not:
Wittgenstein is saying that we should replace the picture of knowledge as what is built on unchanging foundations. There is no fixed point or ground:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In an earlier post I pointed to the parenthetical remark in §84 regarding doubt whether an abyss did not yawn behind it when we open the door. We have no such doubt, but he adds parenthetically:
There are a couple of interesting points here. The first is that Wittgenstein thought it possible that there could be such an abyss. This goes further than the epistemological problem of causality. That things could be radically different from one moment to the next does not seem to be something he rules out. I take this to be part of his mystical attitude which he expressed in the Tractatus:
The second is that despite this he does think it irrational to doubt such things in practice. From On Certainty:
A key to understanding On Certainty is his quoting Goethe:
In order to understand language Wittgenstein does not begin with logic or thinking.
He begins with behavior. A language game is an extension of primitive behavior (Z 545) Instinct first reason second (RPP 689)
The importance of this is far reaching. It reverses the order that has long been held and cherished by philosophers. Logic is arbitrary. It does not stand independent of language and thought, imposing a necessary order on all things, or on determining truth.
The logical rules or grammar are derived from within the lived context of the language game.
@Fooloso4 provides an account that ought be sufficient for our purposes here. @Sam26 provides some further explanation.
Perhaps one way to set out what is at hand that might satisfy @Metaphysician Undercover would be to say that we have no foundations as he thinks of it, but that the fact remains that we get on with it anyway. So far as language is concerned, to quote Churchill, we "Keeps buggering on". And as in language, so in life.
Sugetions?
This refers back to the Tractatus. There he claimed that on the propositions of science which picture or represent the facts of the world could be thought.
What he means by the pneumatic conception of thinking? Pneuma means breath, and by extension, soul, life, spirit (spirit is Latin for breath). In other words, the pneumatic conception of thinking is one that presupposes some condition that makes thought possible in the way that breath or soul makes life possible. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein though that logic was this condition. Invoking Kant, he called it "transcendental" (it differed significantly from Kant's conception but that is another story).
In 108 he says:
This too reminds us of Kant, the Copernican Revolution. Rather than the turn to transcendental conditions, however,he turns to language in practice, language in its role in a form of life.
He draws our attention to what we say and do with language. If we attend to how language is actually used rather than trying to discover something yet unknown about it, something still hidden from us, then we can untangle the tangles philosophy has become entangled in through the bewitchment of language. To be clear, it is not language that causes the entanglement but the misguided activity of philosophy generated by a misuse of language.
This is the statement I disagree with. Doubt is not an all or nothing proposition, it exists by degree, because it is based in the possibility of error, and therefore we limit doubt through probability. So it is not the case that after one reads the sign-post, that the person either proceeds with certainty, or does not proceed because of doubt, the person may proceed with some degree of doubt. Therefore, it cannot be an empirical proposition, because even if the person is observed to proceed this does not mean that there is no doubt. Further, since the possibility of misunderstanding cannot be eliminated, it is illogical to conclude that there is no doubt. So not only is the claim "sometimes we have no doubt" not supported by empirical evidence, it is also illogical, and therefore an extremely irrational statement.
Quoting Fooloso4
This is inconsistent with your quote, in which he is talking about learning "propositions which stand fast for me". That sounds like an unchanging foundation to me.
This is why I say there is incoherency. He was talking about learning proposition which are firmly believed, "stand fast". But at the same time he wants to say here, that there is no grounds for these beliefs. So we have beliefs which stand fast, and he also seems to say that it is irrational to doubt these beliefs, that being why they stand fast, yet they are "groundless" It makes no sense to say that there are beliefs which are groundless, yet it's irrational to doubt them. Since they are "groundless", what is really irrational is to accept them, believe them, and allow them to stand fast, without doubting them.
Quoting Fooloso4
Do you not see this as fundamentally flawed? How can one truly believe that it is possible that one day there will be an abyss outside the door, but also say that it is irrational to have such a doubt? If the person truly believed that it is irrational to have such a doubt, then wouldn't the person in a move of reason deny the belief that it is possible. if you tell yourself such a doubt is irrational, then you will no longer believe it as a possibility, it's irrational. But if your belief in the possibility is stronger then your capacity to tell yourself that the doubt is irrational, then you will not think that the doubt is irrational, and you'll believe in the possibility. Isn't it impossible to truly hold two beliefs which you know to be incompatible, at the same time?
Quoting Fooloso4
Right, I think that this is important. Logic is built on belief, which is a confidence, a type of certainty. These are simple principles which we can have confidence in, like I cannot believe that X is the case, and also that X is not the case, at the same time. And so logic is constructed on a firm commitment, confidence, belief. Language is prior to logic though, and doesn't require the same confidence and certainty. Language can exist without belief, it can exist and be used in cases when people do not know what to believe. Not knowing what to believe is the realm of doubt. So the foundation of language, being prior to logic, is doubt, language is based in doubt, a condition of not knowing what to believe. And from language came logic and belief, which is a form of certainty, because doubt is not a comfortable position to be in.
Quoting Banno
I agree with this, so long as we do not use the fact "that we get on with it anyway", as empirical evidence that doubt has been removed. That's what I object to, because I believe that despite having doubts, we get on with it anyway.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Exact understanding is where there is no doubt; where there is certainty. You state that we need to limit the possibility of misunderstanding to an acceptable degree, implying that the possibility of misunderstanding cannot be completely removed. If the possibility of misunderstanding cannot be completely removed (without any doubt), then we can never be certain to have understanding. Therefore, understanding is impossible.
Otherwise, you are saying that understanding is possible despite the fact that some degree of doubt or some possibility of misunderstanding remains. But in that case, what is the threshold level of doubt at which understanding turns to misunderstanding? How many percentage points below 100% certainty before I am no longer sure whether I understand, or at which I misunderstand?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's not irrelevant. If we are not able to judge whether a misunderstanding has been avoided in the past, then how can we know how to prevent one in the future?
I only asked whether you have ever avoided a misunderstanding before. Have you ever understood something, or is it a matter of degree?
Just catching up on this thread and came across this gem which I wanted to re-post to emphasise the importance of it to understanding the text, in case it got lost in to and fro with MU.
It's a more significant point than its current purpose of just convincing someone that Wittgenstein was not being incoherent.
I think a lot of the misunderstanding around the PI comes from a misplaced attempt to treat it as a treatise, as MU has done ("Wittgenstein's ontology" , "Wittgenstein's epistemology" ... neither of which he is presenting here), but it is also worth attaching to the comments of others about foundational beliefs. It should be borne in mind the the significance of Wittgenstein's view on such hinges are that they are post hoc, they do not represent a 'discovery', we have not learned some new fact about what is the case in learning the nature of such a device, only relieved ourselves of the burden of seeking further assurance.
Debates on this whole site would be a lot more interesting and fruitful if people stopped trying to deduce what 'is the case' from their armchairs.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Most modern psychologists would disagree with you here. Considering some of the outrageous things you claim to doubt, why so certain of this?
Read Wittgenstein's example of time at 88. We settle on the degree of precision required for our goals. To talk about exact understanding does not make sense. Your conclusion does not follow from your argument, because it requires the premise that certainty, or exactness is essential to "understanding", that a person cannot be said to have understood unless there is exactitude, and certainty to one's understanding. But that's not reality, as Wittgenstein is trying to say. If he says "stand roughly here", I understand that he's telling me that he wants me to stand somewhere in this general area, but I don't understand why he's just telling me to stand in this general area, rather than telling me to stand at this point or at that point. So despite the fact that there is understanding, there is also much which is also not understood.
Quoting Luke
Well that's a complex problem isn't it? And that's where doubt is useful, to prevent unnecessary haste in such a judgement. But just because it's a complex problem which has no one solution to fit all situations, doesn't mean that we should reject this conclusion as not the way reality is. When our description of reality gives us a complex problem, it doesn't solve the problem to just say that the description must be wrong.
Quoting Luke
It is explicitly stated, at 81 and 98 for example, and implied all over the place, such as right here at 88, that seeking the ideal is the wrong approach. So if in this book, In which seeking the ideal is portrayed as the wrong approach, Wittgenstein is actually seeking the ideal, wouldn't his efforts to portray seeking the ideal as the wrong approach, defeat his purpose, of seeking the ideal?
Quoting Luke
I'd say it's very clearly a matter of degree, as Wittgenstein describes. When someone says something to me I often grasp what the person intends, to the point of fulfilling that person's purpose. Sometimes not. I never assume to understand with certainty, another's intentions.
Quoting Isaac
I disagree with this. Wittgenstein presents an ontology of rules which is very clearly stated in this section. The rule is the sign-post. This positions the rule as existing externally to the mind which interprets it, it is the sign-post. It is contrary to any ontology which positions the rule as a principle within the mind, an idea. It is also contrary to the common definition of "rule", which states that a rule is "a principle". This is clearly an ontology which gives the existence of "the rule", an unconventional description. If you do not fully understand this, and give respect to the ontological status which Wittgenstein gives to 'the rule", you are likely to equivocate in other parts of the book, thinking that Wittgenstein talks of "rule" in the conventional way, as a principle.
The consequence of this ontological status which Wittgenstein gives to "the rule", is the need for interpretation of rules. This suggests the appearance of an infinite regress of explanation. The problem of infinite regress can be approached in two distinct ways. It can be approached as an ontological problem, in which case the appearance of infinite regress is assumed to be the result of a deficient ontology. Or, it can be approached as an epistemological problem, in which case the appearance of infinite regress is treated as a deficiency in the mind which is trying to understand according to the description established by the ontology. Wittgenstein chooses the latter. He wants to stand fast with his ontology of rules, but this means that the real existence of possibility lies between the mind and the rules by which we understand. Therefore the doubt created by the existence of possibility between the mind and the rules, is inherent within knowledge and understanding.
Quoting Isaac
I suggest that the armchair is the best place for reading and trying to understand books like this. Do you think that philosophers ought to follow the example of Socrates, wondering around with their heads in the clouds? I suppose you believe that philosophers should all meet the same fate as Socrates as well.
Quoting Isaac
That's exactly the point. If we cannot be certain concerning something so basic, like one is not the same as the other, why think that we can be certain about anything at all?
You are mistaking 'acting as if...' for a claim that it is the case. The PI is a method, not a book of facts, Wittgenstein makes this pretty clear when he states quite unequivocally that philosophy does not discover new facts. Philosophy is not capable of deducing what exists and what does not.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, the point is that we are certain about some things whether we think it to be a good idea or not. The psychological state comes first, then we seek to understand it.
It is a statement. If you want to describe statements as "acting as if...", I have no problem with that. But then all ontological statements are "acting as if..", and Wittgenstein's instance of "acting as if..." is no different from any other ontological statement, which are all instances of 'acting as if...".
Quoting Isaac
This is where you, along with what seems like everyone else here except fooloso4, have things backwards. Doubt is the primitive condition, which precedes certainty. The first time you see a specific type of sign-post you will not know what it is telling you unless someone explains it to you. Certainty is created through things like memory exercises and logical practises. Logic, certainty, and belief (which is a form of certainty), follow from language. Prior to this, we have curiosity and wonder, which Socrates described as the foundation of philosophy, and these are forms of doubt.
The result of this reversal which you express, is things like people claiming that doubt must be justified. Doubt does not need to be justified, it is the product of not knowing, it is the primitive condition. Certainty is what needs to be justified. So if unenlightened asserts that there is a tree outside the window, and I doubt that, I need to give no reason for my doubt, because doubt is inherently grounded in a lack of understanding. The burden of proof is on the one who claims certainty, because certainty requires justification. If psychologists disagree, then perhaps this is just another instance in a long history of psychologists being wrong. Or perhaps, Wittgenstein's ontology of rules is wrong, and there is some sort of underlying certainty, as expressed by Plato's theory of recollection.