Fafner

Perhaps, but what Wittgenstein clearly saw (and perhaps Kant didn't) is that innateness or aprioricity cannot make something into a concept, but inste...

But I'm asking what would it mean for our concepts to be out of sync with reality? A concept is simply not something that you can either get right or ...

But I'm not arguing for the innateness of concepts.

The same problem arises for innate concepts as well. How do you know that the concept of length is to be applied to the length of the table and not to...

Of course the concept of 'length' is something the we have created. It really doesn't make sense to 'perceive' a length in an object as an empirical d...

I think that what you say is actually less helpful. Saying that the standard meter is "1 meter long" really says nothing about the use of the stick as...

I cannot resist quoting from Wittgenstein again: PI 251

Of course it has a physical length, but this claim has to be distinguished from saying what exactly its length is in some unites of measurement.

You have to distinguish between the method of calculating length (which belongs to the "system of representation") and factual question about the leng...

I'm not sure that I understand.

I don't know, but in this case the method of measuring with the stick will probably be more complicated and cumbersome. Why is that important?

And btw, I also very strongly recommend reading Cora Diamond's "How Long is the Standard Meter in Paris?" on this topic (PM me if you want a copy) - i...

(PI 50)

It depends on whom you ask...

Perhaps, but I read Quine through Wittgenstenian glasses 8-)

This is true, but I think that never in his career he was at ease with the idea of apriori knowledge (think about "epistemology naturalized" etc.).

OK I see what you mean, but I wouldn't put the point he is making in terms of apriori knowledge, because he wants to argue in the essay only that defi...

On the contrary, he urges his reader to think hard about all sorts of different cases and examples of the sort that usually are ignored in philosophy,...

As I said, without laying down philosophical requirements that say how things must be for rules to be possible.

Yes, I mean what is your source, because it sounds to me like a very un-Quinean thing to say.

Well that explains it, lol The first point is that the issue of communication is peripheral at best with respect to the rule-following problem. Second...

Where did he say this?

I would dispute this interpretation.

Yes we can say that "a means b" for an organism if he usually expects b when he sees a, but this is not "meaning" in the symbolic sense like the words...

Yes, but it is a somewhat different issue that has to do with that quote from Plato. I only posted this passage to illustrate one particular idea (tha...

I was addressing something that Harry Hindu said (and I assumed that you meant to defend his claim). He said: "the meaning of a yellow banana is that ...

No, that's not what I'm saying. "means of representation" means something like an aid or an instrument of representation, and this is compatible with ...

Of course you can measure the meter stick by some other units, but in this case it will be no longer treated as a standard of length.

I think that your story already presupposes that the monkey can understand what 'the banana is ripe' (or that it isn't) mean - but remember, what you ...

But the stick does define what a meter is, or at least this is how it was historically (though nowadays it is defined differently, but that's irreleva...

It doesn't really solve the philosophical problem of meaning to say that there are some 'ideas' in your mind. The fact that something is in your mind ...

If you are interested, when he talks about the existence of the simple elements, he criticizes a view expressed in a passage from Plato which he quote...

No, the means of representation is the physical meter stick itself, and W's point is that it can function as such (as "means of representation") only ...

In the quote he talks about representing the length of things via the unit of meter (or colors by a color sample).

No, 'representing' is only one kind of language game (in Wittgenstein's sense) but there could be many others. However if we talk about 'meaning' - in...

Fine, but this is not sufficient to get meaning. Being able to discriminate between objects by their properties is not the same as representing them a...

OK, but I don't think that it really matters whether we talk about yellow as a color, or yellow bananas in particular. I can change my example: suppos...

I'm afraid I don't get your point.

But this doesn't make the color yellow itself into a symbol for ripeness. Suppose a monkey comes to expect a banana whenever it sees a yellow object. ...

But we don't always need words to tell us what another word means. when a child learns his first language, he is given demonstrative explanations for ...

What dictionaries do is to replace words which the speaker doesn't know their conventional use, with words that the speaker does know how to use, beca...

I think it's worth quoting Wittgenstein once again:

In my first response to you I already said that something can be a symbol without being a word, and I also said that meaning is not just "associating"...

Yeah, that's my point - your memory, or a color of something is a symbol or a representation of something else only in its use as a symbol. Something ...

But you can also see the banana as yellow without knowing that it is ripe (or even knowing that it is something edible). So just seeing the banana is ...

How do you know that you have a memory of your mother, and not some other woman that just looks like her? If you consider your memory in isolation fro...

If you are using a color of something to represent something else, then the color itself becomes a symbol, you don't even need words for that. I don't...

What does it mean "pops into your head"? Surely she isn't PHYSICALLY in your head like your brain is, so in what sense do you want to say that she is ...

Wittgenstein would not disagree. See sections 73-74 from the Investigations that I quoted on p.3, which talk about samples: W' repeatedly makes the po...

I think it could be useful to quote Wittgenstein's himself, and sections 73-74 from the Investigations summarize particularly well what he essentially...