I am absolutely close minded. About any who would preach not knowing and learning things as a virtue.

Animals absolutely have language, not least owing to the fact that we are animals through and through. What is specific about us is our ability to wield negation, and with it, the practice of symbolic, rather than indexical and iconic, uses of language. We can treat 'not-X' as an entity unto itself, and give that use a grammar. A cool cognitive trick, chanced upon by the contingency of our animal evolutionary history, nothing more.

That's from Verse 48 of the Tao Te Ching. Ellen Marie Chen's translation. There are lots of similar thoughts in Lao Tzu's work — T Clark

Sure. Which is why Lao Tzu is far more popular with yoga teachers and wellness centers for than anything resembling philosophy (I've read the Dao. It's fine. One book among a million in which to find some occasionally interesting things).

In any case it's telling that the defense of remaining stupid and ignorant is coupled with some woo woo religion and mysticism. Buddha included. All of this goes hand and hand. What better way to justify being dumb that indulging in some exoticizsed 'Eastern' Wisdom.

As for my quip about neoliberalism: its simply the atmosphere you (and I) breathe. I'm sure you don't think of yourself as a neoliberal shill, but this atomization of the 'thinker' goes hand in hand with that attitude. Or perhaps it's a male thing. Or an American thing. Some rugged individualist nonsense.

A language-game is analogous to a chess game, i.e., you're either playing chess or not. To say you're playing chess, when you're making the wrong moves, is not chess. It's not that you're playing chess incorrectly, you're not playing chess at all. My contention is that there are incorrect moves in the game of chess, so if you move the rook diagonally, then you're not playing chess correctly. If you're teaching the game of chess, then it seems obvious that there are correct and incorrect moves based on the rules. — Sam26

Yes! I was going to use this exact image - of playing chess - as an example, but I dropped it for brevity's sake. A few more words on why it's so important to distinguish between "not playing" (no use) and "playing wrong" (incorrect use): the issue turns on how 'use' is understood. If use is 'use in a language-game', then use is always, as it were, something 'positive'. Use for a purpose, as it were - for doing something. And the point is that if you are not doing something with a word, then in what sense can you be using it - and hence meaning something - at all?

This goes right to the heart of the issue of the 'publicness' of language: the further problem with admitting 'incorrect use' is that this more or less amounts to admitting private language. If there can be no private language for Witty, it is because all meaning is inseparable from doing: and doing is not something that can even in principle, be "private" - which is to say, unintelligible. Doing, for it to count as a 'doing', must be exhibitable. Others must be able, in principle, to 'pick it up', to learn from you how to 'go on', in a similar way.

This is also why it is so detrimental that people so often drop the 'in a language-game' part from 'meaning is use in a language-game'. Language-games are, by definition, public things. In fact, the importance of the idea of the language-game (which I think is so often missed) is that they admit of different kinds. This is so important in fact, that Witty very early on in the PI writes out a whole list of them: giving orders, reporting, requesting, thanking, etc. This is further why language-games are not just 'contexts' (another term that is almost wholly absent from the PI). Would would it even mean to try and 'give orders' privately? Or request privately?

The inseparability of 'use' and 'language-game': they are mutually, 'analytically' defined by means of one another, means that a use which is not a doing is simply not a use at all. One can of course, try to do something, but in a wrong way. One can make a wrong move in chess, and one can say: 'that's not a move you can make'. And like @Banno said, this can introduce novelties. But the introduction of novelties still implies that one must be trying to play chess - it must be something that others, in the future, can also pick up (the en passant): this use expands the language-game: it alters chess itself. Chess is something different after the introduction of the en passant. A new use will bring with it a new language-game in tow, after which one cannot say of that use that it is incorrect. Prior to it's introduction, the en passant was simply a move in a language-game not accepted as chess.

It's true that Wittgenstein doesn't talk of these kinds of language-games, — Sam26

Because they are not language-games. And he talks about that incessantly: idling engines, being mislead by grammar, captured by pictures, etc.

The way they use the word is just incorrect, language-game or not. — Sam26

By what standard? "Langauge-game or not"? This is certainly has no warrant in anything Wittgenstein ever said.

But look, I understand what you're getting at. But the way to put it must be different: it is not that your religious mates had a language-game which 'used the word incorrectly'. It's that your religious mates do not have a language-game at all. That's the point. It's not 'incorrect use'. It's simply - no use. And correspondingly: no language-game. Not any stringing together of words and actions can count as a language-game. That's what it means to be 'misled by grammar'.

All I'm saying is that you can't just create any language-game, and then suppose that you have somehow meant something by your words. — Sam26

If your language-game has a purpose (and it would not be a language-game if it didn't), then the words employed within it absolutely mean something. There's no other standard. This doesn't mean that 'concepts can be used just any old way'. Our doing things always pose constraints on our saying things, which are, of course, part of the doing.

I'm saying that not all language-games are on equal footing, some convey incorrect uses. If this wasn't so, then anything goes in terms of meaning. — Sam26

This second sentence doesn't follow. If I am trying to assert something, I should not use language in the manner of a command. And vice versa. What constrains the 'proper use of language' is what one is trying to do with langauge. But to ask if commands or assertions are 'on equal footing' or 'not on equal footing' is not a question that is sensical. The standards are the forms-of-life. Beyond that, nothing.

Surely, W. implies that there are correct and incorrect uses of words, whether he uses that phrasing or not. — Sam26

There are words which have meaning and words which do not for Witty. And this distinction maps onto words with uses, and words without uses. And this matters because to speak of 'correct' and 'incorrect' uses - which Witty rightly avoids - changes the kind of thing 'use' is. To speak of 'incorrect use' is to introduce the confused notion that there are, as it were, 'incorrect meanings'. But either one means something, or one does not. An 'incorrect meaning' - or 'incorrect use' - would simply be - not a meaning at all. I.e. not a use at all. Which is why he avoids the confused notion of an 'incorrect use' entirely.

you seem to imply that there aren't language-games that don't accord with the proper function of words — Sam26

Yes. That is exactly the implication. Language-games specify 'the proper function of words'. Language-games are not the kind of thing that can be mistaken, wrong, or incorrect (except, perhaps, by the lights of a different language-game - but this would simply be to say that the differing language-games are trying to do different things with words. Say, assertion vs. command).

That doesn't mean that any language-game conveys the correct use of a word. — Sam26

The standard of the 'correct use of a word' just is the language-game. You seem to be implying that there are 'correct uses' that stand outside of language-games. But this is exactly what the entirety of the PI is geared against.

The simple fact is that Witty doesn't talk about correct or incorrect use. Ever. Okay, a lie, he uses the term 'correct use' once at §146, and literally no where else in the entirety of the PI. 'Incorrect' use actually makes no appearance at all, ever. As for the postulated assistant who brings the pillar, sure, one can argue semantics over whether to call it an 'incorrect use' or simply not having learnt the use at all, but the latter is simply more in accord with what Wittgenstein actually said.

And there is, moreover, excellent reason for that. The full phrase is: "meaning is use in a language -game". In other words, 'use' is always relational. To even talk about misuse simply makes no sense. Which is why the word 'misuse' also appears exactly zero times in the PI. To see this, simply try to invert the statement: "Meaninglessness is incorrect use in a language-game". But no language-game specifies 'incorrect use', because 'use' is a function of, let's call it, felicity ("The signpost is in order a if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose"). Either a use fulfills its purpose, or it does not. If it does not, it is not a use at all. Not only does introducing (and lets be clear, it is an extra-textual introduction that does not exist in the PI) 'correct and incorrect use' have practically no textual warrant at all, it also confuses things. It makes it seem as though 'use' could, even in principle, be something not in accord with a language-game. But Witty makes the point over and over and over gain that this is exactly what one cannot do.

"Incorrect use" makes no sense in the context of the PI. There is simply either use, or not use at all. Witty never talks about the "incorrect" use of words. Only words which lack use entirely.

Reading Anscombe is like eating Wheatbix without milk.

That seems to me to be a considered position based on personal experience. — Manuel

Is it?

The first line you quoted makes the incoherent claim that ignorance ("benighted psyches") follows from "reading, arguing, writing" (!).

The second line is nothing but cliche which every 13 year old boy who has read Nietzsche once likes to claim at some point: 'we don't need all these systems and distinctions! Why can't people see see how things are?" Please.

But who is saying that a person just need to be alone in a room with zero stimulus or just go to the mountain hiking with no thoughts in mind? — Manuel

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet. — T Clark

Imagination is spurred and provoked.

This idea of cloistered genius demiurging their way to brilliance is just neoliberal entrepreneurial values transposed into philosophy like a virus. Self-aggrandizing laziness arrogated to the status of virtue.

Again, no one has to read philosophy. But one had better be reading and/or engaging vigorously with a range of things besides.

Stop reading, arguing, writing, building little intellectual kingdoms out of the sand of your benighted psyches. — T Clark

I mean, the irony in this statement is dazzling.

"Stop learning about anything and engaging with people or material ... you benighted knave!".

benighted
/bɪˈnʌɪtɪd/

adjective
adjective: benighted
1. in a state of pitiful or contemptible intellectual or moral ignorance.

Sure, if you just make things up.

You don't have to read philosophy to be a philosopher, but you had damned well be deeply and thoroughly immersed in things which would otherwise require enourmous investments of time, problem solving, and engagement more generally.

Most people are fantastically stupid about things they have not involved themselves with, and their intuitions about things they have not engaged with are almost certainly wrong and misleading. Unless engaged, most thinking, as per the fact that we're barely evolved animals, is a resort to cliche and heuristics that is adapted for middle-scale social engagement and is otherwise awful at most anything else.

The idea that one can sit in a room and have ideas sprout fourth like Athena from Zeus is naive at best, actively debilitating at worst. Genuine thought takes place under the pressure of constraints imposed by encounters that force problems upon us. Those encounters may not be philosophy, but they need to be encounters nontheless which are richly stifiling.

In any case it strikes me as arrogant in the extreme to imagine that one can - or worse, should - disregard the accumulated knowledge and research that humanity has painstakingly cobbled together - again, not necessarily just in philosophy - in order to blank-slate oneself to ideas. If not philosophy then sociology, economics, anthropology, woodworking, social work, history, science, child-rearing, gardening, community-organizing, art making, or better yet, all of these together and more. Apes together strong. Ape sitting in room ruminating on air, almost certainly utterly moronic.

This one is aces:

https://www.amazon.com/Facing-Anthropocene-Fossil-Capitalism-Crisis/dp/1583676090

I've heard great things about this! Let me know how you find it. When Verso has their next sale I'm planning to pick up his Against The Market. Did you finish Davidson's How Revolutionary? btw?

does your constituency tend to consume Murdoch media? — fdrake

We have two major media conglomerates that have an effective duopoly on the press in Australia. Murdoch is one of them, and by far the largest one. In our regional areas, Murdoch owns all the newspapers. His online presence is enormous too, owning the most visited Australian new site (news.com.au). Not to mention skynews.com.au, which the Youtube algorithm agressively pushes. When our PM visited the US earlier this year, one of his stops was to Murdoch to kiss the ring.

The other half of the duopoly, Nine, is run by a former treasurer of the existing government, the same one that basically follows Murdoch's lead like a hurt puppy. Just this year, our government pushed through legislation to force social media companies (read: Facebook) to pay 'local' media for their users even *linking* to their content. Indie media miss out on any of it.

The two (relatively popular) public broadcasters, the ABC and SBS, and consistently under attack for being too left leaning, despite the fact that they are both ensconsed solidly in the middle, and have had their funds constantly cut by the current government. Our media landscape is a disaster.

Some more than others.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10086479/American-anti-vaxxers-faith-groups-manipulating-vulnerable-Aussies-not-jabbed.html

I know it's the DM but to think that we threw our hat in with this awful country. Australians like to fear monger about the threat of China - frankly it's Americans who are fatal to our well being. To think there was a whole cadre of them vying to 'save us' while standing atop of the dead bodies of 700,000 of their own citizens.

Hm, the comparison of sight to the other senses is not homologous. You say that what you see resembles what is seen (how could it not?). OK, a little odd, but fine. But then you say that the smell of grass does not resemble grass. But what does that even mean? It seems to mean: the smell of grass does not resemble the sight of grass. But why the privileging of sight? After all, it doesn't seem like the reverse operation is admissable - why not say, 'the sight of grass does not resemble the smell of grass?'.

In other words, what you call 'resemblance' already takes sight as its privileged sense. But why? Why is 'the wall which produces the sensation' understood on the modality of sight - a conflation of a sensory modality with the sheer existence of the wall as such.

The very language of resemblance is odd too: the idea is that you have two terms, X and Y, where one can or cannot resemble the other. But in the case of sight, the issue of resemblance apparently does not apply, insofar as there is simply one term: 'that which is seen'. But for some reason - and the confusion here seems linguistic rather than substantial - two terms are admitted (arbitrarily?) for the other senses, except, having conflated sight with existence, every other sensory modality is judged to fail to 'live up to' the 'resemblance' understood as 'what it looks like'. But what kind of problem is this? Seems to me like asking why a fish can't climb a tree, despite the fact that for some inexplicable reason the fish seems to do very well in water. But the problem here is not with the fish, but the question itself. But perhaps I'm missing something. If so, what?

Yet another consideration: from a phenomenological standpoint, this separation of sensory modalities is artificial from the get-go. The idea that things don't smell like they look, or feel like they sound is simply not true to experience, outside of some very narrow and artificial boundaries. To quote Alphonso Lingis:

"A thing is not a whole assembled by the central nervous system out of separate sensory data, nor is it a conceptual term posited by the mind and used to interpret the data being recorded on the separate senses. The sense organ focused on a pattern is a segment of the whole interconnected mass of the sensory nervous system. What we pick up with the eyes is already sensed by the whole sensitive substance of our body. When we see the yellow, it already looks homogeneous or pulpy, hard or soft, dense or vaporous, it already registers on our taste and smell; anything that looks like brown sugar will not taste like a lemon. To see it better and to see it as a thing is to position oneself before it and converge one's sensory surfaces upon it. It is the postural schema that comprehends things. To recognize a lemon is not to conceive the idea of a lemon on the occasion of certain sensory impressions; it is to know how to approach such a thing, how to handle it, so that its distinctive way of filling and bulging out space, its distinctive way of concentrating color and density and sourness there becomes clear and distinct" (Lingis, Sensation).

Or in yet other words: all sensing is synesthetic from the get-go, and the parcelling out of senses into discrete modalities is an artificial, analytic operation undertaken after the fact, on the basis of a rationalist confusion.

Georges Dumezil - The Destiny of the Warrior
Jane Jacobs - The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Federico Finchelstein - A Brief History of Fascist Lies. — Number2018

How is this?

Seems alright to me.

What an excellent paper. Frankly Devitt could have stopped the paper at:

"Realism says nothing about truth nor even about the bearers of truth, sentences and beliefs (except perhaps, in its use of 'objective', the negative point that beliefs do not determine existence). Realism says nothing semantic at all" - and be done with it.

It has always struck me as odd that realism ever turned upon some human activity like truth-telling at all. It has always been the status of truth (what kind of thing is truth) and not a 'theory of truth' which any 'realism' would need to tackle.

Devitt's also right to point out that Dummett's appropriation of Witty's 'meaning is use' is somewhat underhanded. To take that phrase seriously would be precisely to rule out Dummett's project. That Dummett has been taken so seriously at all should be puzzling, were it not for the prevalence of 'realist theories of truth' before him.

The causal talk seems a bit iffy to me, but that's not the point of the paper I guess.

Yeah. "We need a couple of Republicans here and there to stand up" is just the bit I thought was not very strong.

I read this when it came out and I think it's almost exactly right.

Georges Dumezil - The Destiny of a King
Georges Dumezil - Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty
James Baldwin - The Fire Next Time
Kathryn Yusoff - A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

Cool, not following conversations it is. Thanks for your time.

Ah yes, I too remember the post where we said we were discussing actual policy. Fine recollection you have, brother bear.

And yes we were talking about the fascism of those who want to deprive the voting rights of political opponents supporters of political opponents, that is correct. 100 points to you.

Look, if you have anything of substance to say beyond making things up and not following conversations, come back to me.

OK, what inspired this conversation hmm?

Oh my mistake, I didn't realize that you were incapable of tracking what the discussion is about and making the most basic of inferences. I will probably make this mistake again.

American culture is, at its heart, plebeian culture. — baker

I'm always one to defend the plebs, who, after all, are all of us anyway, despite what we like to think. But really, I don't like culturalist 'explanations' for anything - culture is explanandum - that which is to be explained - not explanans. Americans - like most other people, to be fair - are victims of liberal politics which is incapable at dealing with any issues at a systemic level. Social and political problems are always displaced into individual ones, which is why the go-to reaction is punishment. American liberals are just the other face of American conservatives. They just happen to like to mete out punishment to different demographics. Where conservatives like punishing women (cf. Texas), liberals like punishing the uneducated. Both delight in punishing the poor. Trump is the result in either case.

:up: Compulsory voting - not taking away more votes - would be a move in the right direction, although hardly a panacea.

Yes, that part of it is almost that simple. But the election itself is not. — tim wood

American "elections" maybe.

The rest of your waffle are just excuses for more American fascism.

If you're a citizen and of age, you vote. It's as simple as that. The US regime however neither has real elections nor a working public education system - nor a democracy for that matter - so it would probably be worth fixing those up first before trying to punish people you don't like - all the better ensure more Trump for years to come.

Citizenship should be enough for to have the right to vote. — ssu

Yep.

Among the worst effects of Trump is that he turns even his so-called opponents into fascists.

I, too, like to consider social and political punishment for underclasses who express views I do not like.

There is even the slightest possibility that this is a good idea.

I am very intelligent.