The unity of conscious experience is an undeniable fact of experience, a priori. — Wayfarer

Labeling this as psychology is the same fear that causes philosophy to want to work outside the involvement of the human. — Antony Nickles

It's an investigation into the human condition--the constant threat of skepticism and the effect on our thinking in reaction to it. — Antony Nickles

I get that it is a tad poetic, but that is not just stylistic, those are grammatical claims, logical claims as it were--I'm saying that's the way our relationship to our expressions works. I make them in all seriousness, and to take them as merely therapeutic seems trivializing. — Antony Nickles

This may seem minor, but aren't we indoctrinated in pointing? and then learn that we can apply that in the case of this sign? — Antony Nickles

(Couldn't we take it as the start of a drawing of weapon? be confused as to what 1992 DOS emoji this was supposed to be?); — Antony Nickles

there is something important about application/employment (given the number of index references). "The meaning of the brackets lies in the technique of applying them." (#557) — Antony Nickles

Thought is essentially dependent on, and bounded in scope by, language—i.e., one can only think if one has a language, and one can only think what one can express linguistically.

Meanings or concepts are—not the sorts of things, in principle autonomous of language, with which much of the philosophical tradition has equated them, e.g., the referents involved (Augustine), Platonic forms, or subjective mental ideas à la Locke or Hume, but instead—usages of words.

Conceptualization is intimately bound up with (perceptual and affective) sensation. More precisely, Herder develops a quasi-empiricist theory of concepts that holds that sensation is the source and basis of all our concepts, but that we are able to achieve non-empirical concepts by means of metaphorical extensions from the empirical ones—so that all of our concepts ultimately depend on sensation in one way or another.

You may not have taught me all the things to say, but some person or people did. “It takes a village.” Or, at least, they taught me up to the point where “Now I know how to go on”. — Luke

the goal of Philosophical Investigations was to understand our desire for seeing everything in one way (word-object). — Antony Nickles

still don't understand the "therapy" label--I mean I barely get what it is actually supposed to mean — Antony Nickles

Yes, there are mistakes, lies, empty words, descriptions that fall short, but that is why there are excuses, the endless depth of language; it is not that our words systematically fail us as much as we fail them, to continue to be responsible for them, answer to make ourselves intelligible. — Antony Nickles

we humans NEED a personal cosmotheory!
Surely not the right one, surely not with all answers included, surely limited, surely "naive". BUT our own one!

Our personal one that will help us endure and embody all these questions we have inside us and follow us till we die!To "use" it as to pacify ourselves at the moments when this Existential Void becomes like a volcano. — dimosthenis9

I would also say, not complete; as there are further contexts for concepts to be extended into. — Antony Nickles

As part of dismantling the word--internal-referent picture, Witt can be seen as offering a picture of word-public "form of life" or "language game", but this is merely to substitute one "meaning" for another, when he is dismantling the entire picture/theorizing about meaning. — Antony Nickles

475. I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but
not ratiocination. As a creature in a primitive state...Language did not emerge from some kind of
ratiocination. — OC

How does it come about that this arrow >>>––> points? Doesn’t it seem to carry in it something besides itself?—”No, not the dead line on paper, only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that.—That is both true and false. The arrow only points in the application that a living being makes of it.

The rules of a game are not a description of the game. — Srap Tasmaner

What is the genesis of these associations? Did these events just so happen to be fortuitously paired in temporal proximity at one point and then this created an association between the two? Or was there a pre-wired inherited association in some cases? — Joshs

I don’t think rules are discovered out there in the world. They are enacted. This is a different concept. — Joshs

We always behave into our world on the basis of ongoing concerns , aims and goals. That makes us sense-making creatures. Sense-makers are anticipative, not simply reactive. This is what makes the world recognizable to us, and means that grunts barks and hisses are motivated and emerge out of a background context of anticipations. — Joshs

It s a representational approach to determining sense.
But for Witt lamguage isnt about adequating one’s understanding to a world or ‘territory’ by mapping it , but about producing or enacting a world. — Joshs

I don’t think Witt ( or Antony) is interested in cutting nature at its joints. — Joshs

My point is that the answer to the bolded question is, yes, I can "write down or give vocal expression to [my] inner experiences—my feelings, moods, and the rest", even "for [my] private use"--only here "private" is not the term that Witt makes of "private" (that no one else would understand), but with the ordinary criteria of personal, secret. I can even express my experience individualistically, say, poetically — Antony Nickles

The point is there are different frameworks (grammar) for each different concept: thinking, reading, rule-following, sensations, justification, etc. — Antony Nickles

Note that I'm avoiding the terms "physical", "material" and "immaterial" because I do not quite understand or trust what they mean. — Olivier5

I think it's simply false to assume that "I can't be wrong about what I think I mean." We are not fully transparent to ourselves IMO.

In Wittgensteinian, you don't necessarily know all the beetles you have. — Olivier5

In exactly clearing up that there is not "meaning" (or a theory of it), Witt makes the space for the personal, by showing us the nature of human expression (and yes all the public yada yada). — Antony Nickles

To say they are just cries is to equate every expression as the same type, when Witt's point is that toothaches and rocks and honesty have different frameworks of criteria for how they work. — Antony Nickles

Who was speaking of science, or eternity, or even reality? None of that has anything to do with the fact that words carry meaning, and that's why people use them. — Olivier5

If "meaning is use", then no meaning is no use. If words carried no meaning, people would have no use for them... — Olivier5

But the game-theory version of all this you find in David Lewis's Convention kinda ends up in the wilderness without quite reaching the revelation it was looking for. — Srap Tasmaner

don't see much to brag about with any of the previous attempts to make philosophy into a science, and I don't really need a new vocabulary, so I've been retreating from the whole approach. — Srap Tasmaner

once we upgraded from signaling to language, we didn't stop signaling. We use words now because, well, there they are. Sometimes when you utter a perfectly coherent bit of English, you're not really speaking at all, but only signaling. We know that, but we forget. ("How are you?" might be an English question or it might be the vocal equivalent of a smile and a nod.) — Srap Tasmaner

I think that's what a language-game is supposed to be. In real life, the sense of things may be obscured by all sorts of other considerations and complexities. Strip all that away and you don't wonder whether something makes sense or how an exchange works; it's obvious. — Srap Tasmaner

It seems you're not sure we know we're on firm ground until we get down to the biological, the material conditions of life, to something we might even do science with. I don't think Wittgenstein feels that need. — Srap Tasmaner

And how do you know that? You did the investigation? — GraveItty

You don't sound pretty enlightened. As a child of it. — GraveItty

I like creativity, but I don't consider it crucial. — GraveItty

Why? Because you are an atheist, and don't like the dogmas of church? Like the church has dogmas, so does science. — GraveItty

There is even the central dogma of biology. We are just vessels of genes and memes in urge to propagate them. So it goes. — GraveItty

Now what a view! Damned, do they really think this? — GraveItty

All life on Earth shares a last universal common ancestor (LUCA)[10][11][12] that lived approximately 3.5–3.8 billion years ago.[13] The fossil record includes a progression from early biogenic graphite,[14] to microbial mat fossils,[15][16][17] to fossilised multicellular organisms. Existing patterns of biodiversity have been shaped by repeated formations of new species (speciation), changes within species (anagenesis) and loss of species (extinction) throughout the evolutionary history of life on Earth.[18] Morphological and biochemical traits are more similar among species that share a more recent common ancestor, and can be used to reconstruct phylogenetic trees.[19][20]

The mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign. (One of reasons for this mistake is again that we are looking for a "thing corresponding to a substantive.")

The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.

As a part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever accompanied it would for us just be another sign.

Or we could say hello in a context of hostility, expecting it to irritate the other. In that circumstance, we could be surprised by a return of the hello. — Joshs

.
When we look at such simple forms of language the mental mist which seems to enshroud our ordinary use of language disappears. We see activities, reactions, which are clear-cut and transparent. On the other hand we recognize in these simple processes forms of language not separated by a break from our more complicated ones. We see that we can build up the complicated forms from the primitive ones by gradually adding new forms. — Blue Book

In that circumstance, we could be surprised by a return of the hello. — Joshs

It would help if we could talk a little more about what materiality and physical action are supposed to be about.
Materiality suggests to me a notion that is at least partially independent of context. — Joshs

The other person could fail to return the hello, and thus lead to all sorts of further developments. — Joshs

Is the token ‘hello’ something we could call a member of a category? — Joshs

Expecting the same or a synonym is a move in a language game. — Joshs

But what would it mean to suggest that the shitting, fucking and crying is always a different sense of these terms? That is , not examples of a larger category called shitting or fucking in general, but events that share a family resemblance without there being any category to hold them? — Joshs

So for instance , if you intend ‘hiss’, ‘bark’ , squeak’ ,’buzz’ and ‘growl’ as meaningless in themselves, you defeat your own purpose, because ‘meaningless in itself’ works in the context of your aims as a specific pragmatic but confused sense. — Joshs

When you use the words ‘bark’, ‘hiss’, ‘squeak’, ‘buzz’ and ‘growl’ do you mean to convey the idea of meaningless in themselves utterances which only take on sense when they interact in particular ways with other such utterances? — Joshs

I am not sure what you mean here by "twist"; I'm seeing it more as "restrict". — Janus

We can certainly say that this is a different kind of reference than ostensive reference, but I see no rationale for denying that it is reference at all. — Janus

The inverted spectrum is the hypothetical concept of two people sharing their color vocabulary and discriminations, although the colors one sees—one's qualia—are systematically different from the colors the other person sees.

You (presumably) take yourself to be referring to meaning when you speak of it, and yet meaning is not a determinate object. — Janus

By that, do you mean not all language usage is referential, or that no language usage is referential? — Srap Tasmaner

Preferences and hunches are to be found in every knowledge system. — GraveItty

If I believe Covid is caused by a non-viral entity, then who are you to say I'm wrong? "Because you are wrong", I hear you say. And that's where you are wrong. — GraveItty

Nature gave you the gift of life. TmYou have the same attitude of the separation of man and Nature as is posed by the dogma of science. — GraveItty

A characteristic distinguishing feature of linguistic practices is their protean character, their plasticity and malleability, the way in which language constantly overflows itself, so that any established pattern of usage is immediately built on, developed, and transformed. The very act of using linguistic expressions or applying concepts transforms the content of those expressions or concepts. The way in which discursive norms incorporate and are transformed by novel contingencies arising from their usage is not itself a contingent, but a necessary feature of the practices in which they are implicit. It is easy to see why one would see the whole enterprise of semantic theorizing as wrong–headed if one thinks that, insofar as language has an essence, that essence consists in its restless self–transformation (not coincidentally reminiscent of Nietzsche’s “self–overcoming”). Any theoretical postulation of common meanings associated with expression types that has the goal of systematically deriving all the various proprieties of the use of those expressions according to uniform principles will be seen as itself inevitably doomed to immediate obsolescence as the elusive target practices overflow and evolve beyond those captured by what can only be a still, dead snapshot of a living, growing, moving process. It is an appreciation of this distinctive feature of discursive practice that should be seen as standing behind Wittgenstein’s pessimism about the feasibility and advisability of philosophers engaging in semantic theorizing…

…
[T]he idea that the most basic linguistic know–how is not mastery of proprieties of use that can be expressed once and for all in a fixed set of rules, but the capacity to stay afloat and find and make one’s way on the surface of the raging white–water river of discursive communal practice that we always find ourselves having been thrown into (Wittgensteinian Geworfenheit) is itself a pragmatist insight. It is one that Dewey endorses and applauds. And it is a pragmatist thought that owes more to Hegel than it does to Kant. For Hegel builds his metaphysics and logic around the notion of determinate negation because he takes the normative obligation to do something to resolve the conflict that occurs when the result of our properly applying the concepts we have to new situations is that we (he thinks, inevitably) find ourselves with materially incompatible commitments to be the motor that drives the unceasing further determination and evolution of our concepts and their contents. The process of applying conceptual norms in judgment and intentional action is the very same process that institutes, determines, and transforms those conceptual norms.

This is where we disagree profoundly. A stop sign's meaning is out there; exemplified in the behavior it produces, but a toothache's meaning is both in here and out there. — Janus

I don't the situation regarding what is private and what is public as close to being as cut and dried as you seem to want to be painting it. — Janus