Forget 'true' correspondence. Stop using words not employed by the PI. 'Ideal', 'True Correspondence', etc - these are MUisms that muddy the text beyond recognition. Among the lessons of the PI is that one ought to give up the search for things like 'true' correspondence or 'ideal way of describing the situation' - not because things are 'non-ideal' or 'not-true', but because the very idea of 'true' and 'ideal' as you use it is misguided from the very start.

Just got this, starting this after I finish Dillion's short book — Maw

It's good. It packages contemporary Marxist critique in a clear and accessible way, with an emphasis on education and mental health. A short, depressing, and punchy read.

Sure, a memory-image is not a paradigm, happy to accept that. Hardly bears on the substance of the discussion, but okay.

Notice that the object itself is the means of representation — Metaphysician Undercover

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.

You deleted your post so I deleted mine and now the order of things is messed up :sad: Anyway, I'm still quite unclear on the nature of your objection. When you say that "there is no equivalence between a paradigm and a memory image", this seems quite straightforwardly wrong, insofar as §56 and §57 both go out of their way - in fact it seems to me to be the very point of both discussions - to establish some rather clear equivalences:

(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.

As a general point though, it's worth pointing out how odd it is to say that things 'stand for' words. Everyone knows what it means for a word to stand for something; the opposite makes little sense. It's also not the case that paradigms 'show the meaning of a name': a paradigm exhibits nothing but itself - one can look at a color sample all day and it will not 'show' its name (short of having its name written on it); it is our use of language and the incorporation of the sample - in its role as a sample in a language-game - that will 'show' the name of a sample. In itself, a paradigm or a sample 'stand for' nothing - they are just there, as dead, inert, stuff. This all has little to do with the sections under discussion, but, just for fun, its worth nothing that this basic semiotic point about the intensionality of language was actually mentioned back in the boxed note of §35:

"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.

A name does not stand for a paradigm, a paradigm stands for, shows the meaning of, a name. — Fooloso4

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.

I see them as very complex and rigid, especially to the extent that their malleability solidifies towards their surrounding environment. At the onset of evolution, simple organisms were more malleable to the variables surrounding them, so changes occur at a fast pace, but as these organisms progressed with due millions of years, their malleability became rigid which is why you don't see evolution occuring today. Not to say that evolution is not happening, it does as we speak but at a rate so slow that it is hardly ever apparent. — Susu

One of the nice things about evolution is that for the most part, it tends to - by nature, as it were - shape organisms which strike a balance between rigidity (or rather, what is called 'robustness') and plasticity. Anything too robust, will, over the long run, find it hard to cope with environmental changes. Anything too plastic won't (necessarily) be able to take advantage of the environment around it. Of course, exactly what counts as robust and what counts as plastic is itself determined by the pace of environmental change. So the animals deep under the sea are, for example, incredibly ancient and have stayed the same for a long time because their circumstances don't change much. Whereas species on land - or just in the sunlight in general - have alot more to deal with, environmentally speaking, and thus have a far faster rate of evolutionary change.

So if deep-sea species are anything to go by, I don't think it's true at all that evolution is 'harder' with currently evolved organisms. If anything, the complexity of species (spurred on by the complexity of environment) tends to encourage more, and not less evolutionary innovation. There's a reason why evolutionarily primitive organisms are all so similar (a bunch of nuclei, vacuoles, flagella, mitochondria, etc) - is because (among other things) their environments are all of limited variety. Complex creatures, on the other hand, able to do alot more (than swim around in warm ponds), also have more opportunity to make use of evolutionary novelties. This is all very broadly speaking of course, and a thousand and one factors go into determining evolutionary pace, but these are - I think anyway - the broad tendencies and strokes that characterize evolution as it stands on Earth.

If you're interested in questions like these, you might want to try a book like this, or this.

A quick interpretive note on the last two sections I wrote about: it's often noted that Witty is targeting the idea that the use of names must correspond to images in our head. The open question is whether this entails the opposite position, namely, that words (or names, to be more specific) must then correspond to things 'out there' in the world instead. But, given the equivalence established between 'out there' and 'in here', one ought to instead read Wittgenstein as rejecting the inside/outside dichotomy altogether.

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.

§57

§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".

Ahh, I've been crazy busy over the holidays so I haven't been keeping up my commentary, so I'm just gonna pick up where I left off. Excuses if I'm a little behind compared to the thread, and not engaging in current conversation. Apologies to @Luke too for not continuing our conversation where it left off, but I just want to catch up!

---

§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.

Malicious authoritarian garbarge turned up to eleven.

Yeah, it may have to be in the New Year if possible as I'm run off my feet a little with holiday commitments (the best kind).

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? — Luke

No, only that it can be - if that's it role in a particular language game.

I suggested that fictional names had samples/standards. — 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 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? — Luke

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.

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. — 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'.

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. — Sam26

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.

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? — 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.

Probably one of the most intellectually titillating prefaces to a book I've read in a while:

"Philosophers, past and present alike, have invariably been prone to be long on promises and short on performance. Priding themselves on their 'solutions', they are in fact remembered and cherished for the problems which they raised. Their 'solutions', above all, have proved to be - for us - problems. I know of scarcely one philosopher (Socrates always excepted) who ever raised a problem as a problem. I mean terminally as a problem, not merely by way of entry into his theme.

Thus Zeno himself never viewed his paradoxes as problems; he advanced them only as proofs calculated to establish the impossibility or unintelligibility of motion. There have been dogmatic and there have been sceptical, but there have been no problematic philosophers. More precisely, there have been no problematic philosophers eo nomine, though in fact none has succeeded in being anything case. They have lacked self-knowledge. They have failed to understand the true dignity of their achievements. For the problematic character of philosophy, certainly of all philosophy up to the present, need not be altogether a misfortune. It is the happy suggestion of Leo Strauss that Plato understood the eternal Ideas to be the great range of problems that preside over man's deepest reflections and that it is in being open to those problems, as problems, that he acquires Socratic ignorance, which is the same as Socratic wisdom"

- Jose Benardete, Infinity

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. — Sam26

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.

§55

§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.

This thread has until page 2 to get substantial or it's going.

§54

§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.

Reading for 2018! (Bold indicates favourites)

Philosophy of Math

Albert Lautman - Mathematics, Ideas, and the Physical Real
Fernando Zalamea - Peirce's Logic of Continuity: A Conceptual and Mathematical Approach
Fernando Zalamea - Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics
Mary Tiles - The Philosophy of Set Theory - An Historical Introduction to Cantor's Paradise
Brian Rotman - Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being
Brina Rotman - Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting
Brian Rotman - Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero
Brian Rotman - Ad Infinitum... The Ghost in Turing's Machine: Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In. An Essay In Corporeal Semiotics
Bob Clark - Wittgenstein, Mathematics, and World

Animals and Aesthetics

Elizabeth Grosz - Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art
Elizabeth Grosz - Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power
Raymond Ruyer - Neofinalism
Jakob von Uexküll - A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning
Richard Prum - The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - And Us
Adolf Portmann - Animal Forms and Patterns: A Study of the Appearance of Animals
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson - On Growth and Form
Andreas Wagner - Arrival of the Fittest: How Nature Innovates

Deleuze, the Digital, and Aesthetics

Aden Evens - Logic of the Digital
Claire Colebrook - Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics, and the Digital
Alexander Gallloway - The Interface Effect
Seb Franklin - Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic
Ronald Bogue - Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts
Anne Sauvagnargues - Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon
Anne Sauvagnargues - Deleuze and Art
Daniella Voss - Conditions of Thought: Deleuze and Transcendental Ideas
Elizabeth Grosz - The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism

Agamben and Virno

Giorgio Agamben - What Is Real?
Giorgio Agamben - What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays
Giorgio Agamben - What Is Philosophy
Giorgio Agamben - Taste
Giorgio Agamben - The Use of Bodies
Giorgio Agamben - The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath
Giorgio Agamben - Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy
Giorgio Agamben - The Unspeakable Girl: The Myth and Mystery of Kore
Giorgio Agamben - The Fire and the Tale
Giorgio Agamben - The Adventure
Giorgio Agamben - Karman: A Brief Treatise on Action, Guilt, and Gesture
Paolo Virno - Essay on Linguistic Negation: For a Linguistic Anthropology
Paolo Virno - When the Word Becomes Flesh
Paolo Virno - A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life

Other

Wilfrid Sellars - Science, Perception, and Reality
Wilfrid Sellars - Naturalism and Ontology
Walter J. Ong - Orality and Literacy
Damien Cahill & Phillip Toner - Wrong Way: How Privatisation and Economic Reform Backfired
Etienne Balibar - Spinoza and Politics
Moria Gatens & Genevive Lloyd - Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present
Daniel Dor - The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology
Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Bruce Pascoe - Dark Emu
Miguel Sicart - Play Matters
Byung-Chul Han - Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese
Byung-Chul Han - The Agony of Eros

---

This was a super interesting year, where I kinda oscillated between the super abstract (math) and the super concrete (aesthetics), so as to get a better feel for the relation between the two. Not a great deal of politics or sociology this year, which is always a bit of a failing, so maybe this is something I can remedy next year. I think the path forward is going to consist in a bit more math - especially Wittgenstein - and after, possibly a project on gesture and language. In any case, happy reading for the New Year everyone! And of course:

Currently Reading: Jose Benardete - Infinity: An Essay on Metaphysics. This is a book I've heard credited for helping to revive analytic metaphysics, and also as having affinities with Deleuzian metaphysics, so I'm pretty hyped for it.

Just a small correction: I think you mean "taught". — Luke

:up: - corrected.

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. — 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!

Ugh, another fragile snowflake complaining about complaining.

§53

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).

Ha, ha, I hope that's a joke — Metaphysician Undercover

Exactly what do you think the root word of typ-ical is?

Ugh, Dawkins set the public understanding of biology back by at least a decade or two, and as a result we get threads like these.

The trick is this: in its role as the standard meter, one can 'never' say that the Standard Metre is or is not 1m long. But the lump of metal that is the standard meter, does not always play that role in our discussions. Keep an eye on roles, and you can't go wrong here.

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. — fdrake

This seems like a good moral to draw!

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). — fdrake

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.

we'd still have the ability to quantify rotation even without triangles. — fdrake

In which case movement - difference - would still be primary, no?

Just to clear my thoughts: is right to say angles are inherently proportional? Do they (always) express a ratio? Having trouble thinking this through.

Once we've set the stage for the units of a dimension, we can largely forget that the units are there. — fdrake

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.

These people live and die their public lives by the attention lavished upon them by the public. Deprive it of them, and so deprive that life.

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? — Luke

Yeah, to all things that have the same kind of role that both names and the Paris meter occupy in their respective games.

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. — fdrake

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).

I actually want to come back to §50 for a bit and 'intervene' in the debate that was going on between @Luke and @Banno a little earlier. My post on it before was trying to hew closely to the text, but I want to try something a little more free-form to really tease out the significance of the section. Because there's definitely something weird going on with it, and I wanna get at exactly what. Anyway, I want to start with this trilemma by Banno:

is the referent of "One Metre" a length, or is it a stick, or is it a process?

I say it is a length. — 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?

§51-52

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?".

I have highlighted the circumstances where ascertaining nurture problems is important which is when intervening in problem lives and dysfunction. You seem to be talking only from an abstract theoretical perspective. — Andrew4Handel

The only thing abstract here is the artificial attempt to lump causes into fake boxes labelled 'nature' and 'nurture'. Nothing I said implied that we cannot isolate causes. What I object to is the secondary, derivative, and unnecessary effort to qualify them by some under-considered metaphysical distinction that does nothing but impair investigation into such causes. Everyone knows what it is to find the cause of something; discerning weather that cause belongs to 'nature' or 'nurture' is just the kind of 'abstract theoreticism' that does more to obfuscate than illuminate.