Streetlight

What, exactly, is your point?

Why? No, I'm literally asking what it is you are talking about about, and you're dancing around this point. What I'm asking for is quite simple: estab...

OK, if you want to proceed with a discussion based on a tautology, don't let me stop you.

Because it's philosophically useless.

Because it's a tautology.

Which is relevant how exactly, in the context of free will? *And should you really be trying to define one ambiguous idea by another, entirely ambiguo...

Presumably my teapot does not have free will, and I do. What is the relevant difference between me and my teapot, as far as free will is concerned? An...

Because it is basic philosophical practice. Figuring out 'if we have free will' is a noble goal, but not before asking if the question itself makes an...

One could, of course, say that it's unfair to fools to call them all men.

Because the kind of thing that you or I 'am' is not at all clear. And without knowing that, you might as well have said anything at all. Moreover, the...

Incredibly unclear. I guess I'm not sure what we disgree about. This is just the question I've been asking all along.

But the onus is on you here: if you say 'you and I' are the subjects of free will, presumably you want to say something like 'you and I, and not this ...

By what kind of subject? Organized by what field of constraints? (And constraint must figure into it; after all, that I cannot turn into a unicorn at ...

This means nothing though. Or at least, one cannot draw anything philosophically useful from this answer. But there certainly are different kinds of f...

But one presumably knows what a vanilla cupcake is. What kind of thing is free will?

Part of the problem about asking after the 'fasifiability' of free will is that it's not even entirely clear that the very concept itself is intelligi...

Ugh, white people didn't just 'side' with black people as if some two-bit video game. They 'sided' with them over specific political injuries and inju...

One may or may not excercise a right, and to not excercise it is not to violate it. The Miranda right to 'remain silent' upon arrest is not broken whe...

If you need to try and even dignify that question using philosophy or science, you ought to give up on both.

No it does not, not in the slightest. The so-called butterfly effect must be thought of in terms of the dynamic systems in which it comes to be an eff...

Oh dear, it must be hard to have to live like that.

But meaning is not at all exhausted by definitions. In fact definitions ought to be perhaps the last thing one ought to consider when thinking about m...

No. Meaning is not an equality claim. Meanings are not even claims at all. Hence the link.

The problem you posed isn't one.

Consider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_act

No.

As if meaning is a purely epistemic issue...

Surprised that you're entertaining this at all Banno.

Righty-o, well, as I've made clear with Srap, this isn't what I was talking about, so I guess we don't really disagree other than over the scope of th...

Yeah, this is a lovely genetic account of how meanings become sedimented and ossified, as it were, such that the grounds of their coming-to-mean becom...

You're right of course, I mean, who, on a philosophy forum, would associate 'language is use' with either Wittgenstein or meaning? The bombshells keep...

Why yes, in a thread discussing Wittgenstein's conception of meaning, I am speaking about conventional meanings. I can only hope the shock of this rev...

I'm not sure how I gave the impression I wasn't. What else would already-established uses/conventional uses of language refer to?

Oh dear, I must have expressed myself badly indeed. By alreday-established use I simply mean something like the dictionary definition of words. To the...

Again, if by conventional you simply mean grammatically regular, than sure, it's 'conventional'. But as I've noted for about the third time now, this ...

What 'conventions of Cakese'? I don't understand.

But I have been quite clear, in almost every one of my posts, that by convention I mean already-established use (of language), and not grammatical reg...

Eh, then you are using words in a different way than I am. That's OK, so long as we're clear. I'll only add here that this is not how Wittgenstein emp...

Nothing. At least, that's the whole point: these criteria must be 'lived', and the only thing that that guarantees their uptake (or not) is the 'form-...

The latter.

At a minimum one would have to grant that the phrases and gestures have a grammar particular to them (such that there would be different kinds of lexe...

Call it what you like.

You misunderstand what is at stake though: the entire point is that it is a category error to speak of 'private' use. Use, by nature, is 'public' (whi...

Why did you think we were discussing shared use? I don't believe either you or I even once used the word 'shared', nor any of it's cognates. And, give...

hzhxehd hskidkdd bskslkc kfofeudh dkdoepe jwuewownzv aajn'malnq llllllpealaf This means something like "let's eat cake". As does the phrase - in the w...

To be lazy, I meant it quite literally - you didn't, in affirming that new usages must maintain a 'link' to convention, actually provide a reason to b...

One can accept that (although in truth I see no reason to), without being commited to accepting that meaning is 'conventional' use.

Yes! This, exactly. I reckon if one can grasp the import of this passage, almost the entirety of the PI falls into place. The book sounds interesting ...

But of course - everything that Witty designates as 'language on holiday' or 'language as an idling engine', etc: these are uses of language where the...

The object of agreement is different. For Wittgenstein as for Cavell, there is 'agreement in the form of life' at stake. It is not an agreement with r...