But it doesn't. See p.84 for the 'Godel' example. "The creator of the incompleteness theorem" does not serve to pick out, uniquely, Godel, but instead, Schmidt.

Yet when we are talking about Godel, we are not talking about Schmidt. — Banno

This was the argument that cinched the whole book for me.

I was thinking more Savage Garden with a twist but sure!

As if: "I love you to the moon and back" raises astro-engineering problems.

Yes, Banno rightly cottons on to the statement as a performance, and dispenses, rightly, with the trash about the limits of language and paradoxes and self-reference and other miscellany.

As an example of how not to conduct philosophy, perhaps.

I wouldn't.

Only the naive and the philosophical think that 'I love you more than words can say' expresses a statement about the relationship between words and one's love. One actually has to dumb oneself down to treat it like that, as most in this thread seem to have done.

It doesn't. It just raises stupid non-problems mistaken for philosophical ones.

From a modding perspective, one possible consideration is whether a thread is 'intra-religious' or has wider bearing on topics outside that one particular system of belief. I have this thread in mind as an example of an 'intra-religious' one:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/4669/christian-exclusivist-universalism

- in which what's at stake are basically arguments internal to Christianity, without having much bearing on wider, philosophical considerations. I would suggest that, would any threads be subject to brutal culling, this kind of thread ought to qualify - sheerly because we're a philosophy forum, and not a religious one - if there is a intra-religious debate, it can be taken to one of the multiple religious forums that exist out there. But that's just a proposal, pending others, for consideration.

The lectures are alot less tightly constructed than his monographs, in that you can really see that they're geared towards students in his class studying them as if for the first time. He really tries to get across the excitement and innovation that each philosopher brings to the table, and although they broach similar themes to the books, they're alot more forgiving in their approach. It'd say it's similar ground covered in a very different way.

Tsk tsk. All these people taking the statement at a constative, rather than performative level.

Also, I just noticed you mentioned it in the OP but Deleuze's lectures (on Kant, Spinoza, and Leibniz in particular) I think would make for a fantastic series for reading. The lectures are very lucid, and Deleuze is easily one of the best readers of the history of philosophy that one can come across. Best of all, they're free and readily accessible:

https://www.webdeleuze.com/sommaire

Will read the Riemann essay over the weekend.

Not that I've compared them all, but I love Kemp Smith's translation, which, while supposedly less strictly faithful to the letter of the CPR, has a lovely fluidity to it, moreso at least than Guyer and Woods' one.

Also - again, not that I've read them all - but I really enjoyed Adorno's lecture series on the CPR, which one can find in published form as an accompanying text.

'fraid not.

That's not a copy of the CPR. That's a collection of abridged readings from different works of Kant. The CPR alone is about 800 or so pages long (from the top of my head).

I guess you mean that the underlying physical reality does not change — DiegoT

No, I literally mean not a single aspect of scientific practice, nor any theory that would qualify as scientific, would change or have to be amended. Science doesn't give a flying hoot about theology, which can drown in a well as far as it's concerned.

God and other theological trash are not hypotheses to be disproved. It's far worse. They don't even qualify as hypotheses to begin with.

Science is happily indifferent to theistic claims; were theology to disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow night, nothing about science would change. In that sense, science is indeed atheistic: theistic claims are beneath the dignity of scientific concern.

Before moving on to and past §37 - which begins a new line of argument dealing with names - do people have questions or interpretive issues they want to raise with the discussion of ostensive explanation in the sections covered so far?

One thing I will mention - because I think there's been some confusion around this with respect to some of the discussion here - is that in the sections covered in the PI so far, Witty has been dealing not with 'ostension in general' (mere acts of pointing), but what he calls 'ostensive explanation' or 'ostensive definition', which involves, specifically, explaining words by means of ostension. That is: ostensive act (pointing) + utterance of words. If this coupling is not kept in mind, the discussion here will be unintelligible.

When it comes to "It's raining," I prefer the "dummy subject" interpretation: "It" is all syntax and no reference. The verb carries all the referential meaning in the text. — Dawnstorm

:up:

§36

§36 is a bit confusing on first blush, but it's simply recapitulating what I've called the differential nature of ostension: one bodily action can correspond to many different kinds of things:

§36: "We cannot specify any one bodily action which we call pointing at the shape (as opposed to the colour, for example)"

The only addition here is that Witty gives 'names' to the two parts of the ostensive act: the movement of the hand is 'bodily'; that which the movement corresponds to is 'mental' or 'spiritual'. This characterization seems a bit strange, but it allows Witty to start to introduce - in a very oblique way - a vitally important theme that will preoccupy much of the PI: the fact that we can be misled by language.

There is a possibility that an ostensive act may simply correspond to no particular kind of thing at all (a rough and inexact example: pointing out 'that color', while pointing to clear water; In this case, the pointing 'suggests' something that isn't there - the water has no color). When Witty says:

§36: "Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit." (emphasis in original).

The reference to 'spirit' here must be understood pejoratively, like an illusion, or, in the words of the boxed note in §35, as a 'superstition'. There are uses of language which engender spirits and superstition.

:grin: It guess it was more an association that came to my mind while reading §34. At the very least I think there are parallels that would be interresting to explore in their own right!

§35

§35 continues the critique of 'characteristic experiences' as the grounding for ostensive explanations begun in §34. If, in §34, characteristic experiences were critiqued for being open to different interpretations, in §35 Witty now also adds that ostensive explanations also cannot be separated from the use of words that accompany them. That is, ostensive explanations are not just a matter of mute, physical pointing, but the coupling of such physical actions with the utterance of words (like, 'that's the color' or 'it's that shape').

To the extent that this is so, Witty argues that the presence of words makes all the difference, because words themselves - the same words - can mean very many different things, because the same words can be used differently, which in turn, determines how it is an ostensive explanation is meant to be 'taken'. The 'same' (physical) pointing action, accompanied by different uses of words, will be understood differently - will have a different meanings.

At stake here is the question of intensionality (not intentionality, which means something entirely different): the understanding of something as something: the pointing as meaning X, rather than Y. The discussion here is meant, among other things, to show that intensionality cannot be dictated or determined by 'experiences', but instead, only by the use of language, which is inseparable and essential in the functioning of an ostensive explanation. This is the point of the rhetorical question which ends the subsection -

§35: "But do you also know of an experience characteristic of pointing at a piece in a game as a piece in a game?" (emphasis in original)

- which, if I'm right, is meant precisely to be a nonsense question (the 'right' response to this question ought to be something like: 'what is that question even supposed to be asking'?). The issue of intensionality must be kept in mind to make sense of the boxed note right after §35, which is rather enigmatic, but deals precisely with the difference between the two statements:;

(1) That is blue; [that particular thing is blue colored] and
(2) That is blue. [that is an example of the color blue]

Once again, it's a question of the differential nature of ostensive explanations, and of how and why they are differential: because of the different ways words are/can be used when giving such explanations. Importantly, this is specific to the issue of meaning:

§35 (boxed note): "It is only in a language that I can mean something by something. This shows clearly that the grammar of “to mean” does not resemble that of the expression “to imagine” and the like."

If we go with Riemann, I wonder if it might also be interesting to read it alongside Kant's essay on negative magnitudes ('Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy'), which I've always wanted to read as well.

Riemann would be cool! If Merleau-Ponty, I'd love to read The Structure of Behaviour (which I haven't yet), or else de Vries or O'Shea on Sellars (maybe both?). Or, for something more (too?) challenging, Joanna Seibt's Properties as Processes - also on Sellars.

Or, to be purely selfish, it would be lovely if people were willing to read either Reza Negarestani's Intelligence and Spirit (on rationalism), Gilles Chetalet's Figuring Space (on math), or Giovanni Maddalena's The Philosophy of Gesture (on pragmatism and Pierce) with me - my planned reading, essentially - but that's probably a long shot.

Edit: A work that might have a nice cross-audience appeal is John Haugeland's Dasein Disclosed - an analytic philosopher's take on Heidegger, reading him in a Sellarsian bent. Might be cool.

Historical note: the above contains the seed of the idea - elaborated subsequently by Wilfrid Sellars - regarding the critique of the 'myth of the given': roughly, the idea that sheer experience (or 'sensation') alone cannot dictate meaning in any straightforward manner, and that meaning is irreducibly normative (governed by certain standards - which Witty will conceptualize in terms of grammar or 'criteria'). This theme of an attack on 'the given' - not named as such - is found all through the PI, perhaps most crucially in the upcoming attack on 'private language'.

It's much easier when there's a common point of reference to work between everyone with :)

§34

In §34, Witty continues to pose an objection to himself, one that goes one step further than the failed self-critique of §33. Recall that in §33, the appeal to 'attention' was criticised for being too equivocal a notion to answer the question of how ostensive explanations are individuated ('attention' can work in many different ways, and so cannot function to explain how ostensive explanation works to pick out one kind of thing and not another kind of thing). §34 tries to address this counter-objection by turning instead to 'characteristic experiences', which, unlike 'attention', are always the 'same' - that is, univocal, rather than equivocal.

This is meant to correct the 'defect' of the (self-critical) argument in §33, by having the same experience always undergird the individuation of ostensive explanation (rather than the different - and hence inadequate - modes of attention offered in §33). However, Witty notes that this too is not good enough, because even if the 'same experience' always accompanies an ostensive explanation, there is no guarantee that such an experience will itself always be interpreted in the same way:

§34: "Can’t his hearer still interpret the explanation differently, even though he sees the other’s eyes following the contour, and even though he feels what the other feels?".

Univocity of experience gives way once again to equivocity (diversity) of interpretation. In place of experience then, Wittgenstein once again emphasizes the use of words in an ostensive explanation - a use which cannot be reduced to the experiences which merely accompany 'the giving and hearing of an explanation'.

So at 23 Witty proposes "countless" different "kinds of sentence", and each kind is described as a distinct language-game, such that new kinds come into existence and others become obsolete. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, read carefully. Witty does not describe sentences as language-games. Here is the start of §23:

§23: "But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question and command? - There are countless kinds; countless different kinds of use of all the things we call “signs”, “words”, “sentences”. And this diversity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten". (my bolding)

Witty does indeed begin by saying that there indeed countless kinds of sentence. But importantly, he then goes on to say that there are "countless different kinds of use of all the things we call 'signs', 'words', 'sentences'". What is 'countless' in the second part of the sentence are neither 'signs', 'words', or 'sentences', but the kinds of use of them. In other words, the bolded 'this diversity' refers to the kinds of use, and not individual 'signs', 'words', and 'sentences'. And it is the kinds of use that correspond to 'new types of language' and 'new language-games'.

And this makes far, far more sense that equating language-games with sentences. Not only because Witty is explicit that language-games consist of "language and the activities into which it is woven" (of which a 'sentence' cannot be), but also because it is consistent with Witty's previous description of a language-game as "the whole process of using words" (§7), where again, use is foregrounded, and not as it were, units of meaning. Finally, the fact that the primacy of the 'sentence' gives way to being simply one element in a set (list) of consisting of 'signs', 'words', and 'sentences' means that even if Witty did mean to say language 'were' sentences, they would also have to be 'signs', and 'words'. Which itself would be an incredibly strange thing to say.

In any case, any careful reading of §23 will dispel the mistaken idea that language-games could be identified with sentences - and this is to say nothing of the upcoming discussion about 'simples' and 'complexes' which would further put a definitive nail in the coffin of that reading.

So I believe #23 to be quite important because we have an approach presented here, toward the division of human activity. He asks "how many kinds of sentences are there?" And each different kind of sentence (a seemingly endless number), is itself a different language-game...

...The principle by which the activity, language, is divided here, is according to the kinds of sentences. And you will see that each different kind of sentence serves a different purpose. — Metaphysician Undercover

My only comment here would be that I would not talk of 'sentences'. Witty does not - at least in the context of defining language-games - and there's a very good reason for this, which will come up a little later down the track. While it's totally correct to say that language-games are embedded in 'forms-of-life', these language-games do not correspond to sentences, and it is certainly not the case that sentences 'are' language-games, as you put here (which in any case would be inconsistent with Witty's preliminary definition of a language-game which consists of "language and the activities into which it is woven" (my emphasis). Anyway, the point is: if you're thinking about language-games, forget 'sentences'.

Supplementary comment:

One way to appreciate what's going on at a more global scale is that Wittgenstein is dealing with a twist on the classic question of sufficient reason - but instead of asking 'why is there something rather than nothing', at stake here is a more modest: 'why and how does ostensive explanation pick out this rather than that?' The search for a principle of sufficient ostensive explanation, if you will.

§33

§33 marks a new turn in the argumentation of the PI. From here till roughly §36, Witty will begin to discuss the role of 'experiences' in the understanding of ostensive explanations. Before getting to that, it's important to recap a little, as Witty himself does.

Let's recall the main problem being addressed: that ostension is differential, which means that the same ostensive action can point out many different things, which in turn, raises the question of how we can tell which one of the many things is being pointed out (how can an ostensive explanation be 'individuated', as it were?). Witty's position so far is that one needs to have a 'mastery over the language game' - an understanding of kinds of words, or grammar - in order to answer this question.

§33 tries to address an objection to this scheme. The objection runs that we don't need any such mastery, and that, in order to know what is being pointed out by an act of ostension, all we need to do is appeal to acts of 'attention' or 'concentration':

§33: "You’ll say that you ‘meant’ something different each time you pointed. And if I ask how that is done, you’ll say you concentrated your attention on the colour, the shape, and so on".

Wittgenstein's retort to this is that attention itself is a differential, or rather, equivocal concept, and that 'attending' to something (a color, say), can itself mean very many different things (Witty provides a few different, equivocal examples of 'attention'). If this is so, then this means that the appeal to 'attention' just displaces the question back a step, rather than answering it: if 'attention' is what individuates an ostensive act, then what individuates attention?

Witty then qualifies his reply with an acknowledgement that while such acts of attention may (and often do) accompany the understanding of ostensive explanations, they nonetheless do not, or cannot, play a role in explaining how it is that ostension 'picks out' one aspect of what is being pointed to over others. At this point he makes draws a really interesting analogy: that while playing chess always involves moving pieces 'from here to there', actually playing chess involves more than (just) this. Witty doesn't expand on this, but it's clear this this 'more' would involve something like an understanding of how and why such moves are made: the analogous counterpart to which would be an understanding of how and why an ostensive explanation picks out this aspect of something, and not another (color, and not shape, say).

§34 - §36 will expand on this line of thought, with respect to 'characteristic experiences' in place of 'attention'.

In relation to "rules", I agree that it is too early for a discussion of Wittgenstein's position, but in relation to "games", I do not agree. "Language-games" have been extensively mentioned, beginning with the explicit definition at #7 — Metaphysician Undercover

It's true that §7 does provide a minimal definition of a language game -

§7 "I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the activities into which it is woven, a “language-game."

- elaborated slightly in §23 -

§23: "The word “language-game” is used here to emphasize the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life."

- but, these definitions are simply stipulative and (so far) shed little light on the specificity of why Wittgenstein calls them 'games' (and not, say, 'language-excercises' or 'language-activities'). Without an explicit discussion of games - which has not happened, but soon will - it's still the syntagm 'language-games' - taken as a whole - that is the matter for discussion, and not 'games' as such.

the thrust of the sections we've been discussing has to do with the relation between ostension and games, not the relation between ostension and rules. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sorry, by sections we've been discussing I simply meant the paragraphs in §31, which gave rise to the above discussions about games and rules. As far as the PI goes, as pre-§31 has mostly been concerned with establishing that a certain kind of knowledge is needed for ostensive explanations to function effectively. I still think it's much too early and speculative to be discussing Wittgenstein on games and rules.

§32 is a short but illuminating subsection:

§32 brings the discussion so far back to Augustine briefly, and is thus useful to measure the distance travelled between §1 - the beginning of the book - and now. Recall that Witty's initial gripe with Augustine's theory is that it had no place for different kind of words:

§1: "Augustine does not mention any difference between kinds of word."

In the distance between §1 and §32, we've leant why this matters: without an ability to distinguish between different kinds of words, it would not be possible for ostensive acts to make sense. §32, in turn, implies that it is part and parcel of learning a language that we learn how to make such distinctions. Witty's complaint against Augustine, now extended here, is that Augustine takes for granted that someone can already make such distinctions:

§32: "Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a foreign country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if he already had a language, only not this one."

This is the importance of the contrast between the child, and the foreign language learner: both are learning a language, but the child has to learn something the foreign speaker does not - the ability to distinguish between different kinds of words. The child has to learn (at least) two things, the foreigner speaker, just one. The critique of Augustine then, is that he takes the foreign language speaker as his model, and not the child; or rather, that Augustine has no place in his theory for the child.

Mm, it is not the mere fact of 'having descriptions' that matters. That alone would pull the rug out from any causal theory before it even got off the ground. Its instead a question about - necessity: these descriptions, and not others. Anyway, I'll let yall get back to reading.

Awkward.

I ate your friend Paul btw. He's been replaced by a robot that looks a great deal like Paul. I'm sorry you had to find out this way.

I'm simply commenting on the phenomenon of 'what seems obvious' - not really anything to do with the book or its argument. Kripke does a better and more rigorous job than I can in answering your question.

I think it came out of my having read Witty first. Kripke's thesis follows quite nicely from that background.

I would hold off, for now, of getting too deep into a discussion of the nature of games and their relation to rules. There's alot of that to come, and as it stands, the thrust of the sections we are discussing have to do with the relation between ostension and rules (that just happen to be in the context of a game).

As it stands, §3 is more indicative than rigorous. It should be taken, at this point, as nothing more than a flag to look out for - one over the question about the articulation of rules and games, and the possibility, still to be explored, that the former do not exhaust the latter. Anything beyond that is going far beyond where we are with the text atm.

It's interesting 'what seems obvious' to different people. I remember the first time I came across Kripke's thesis that names have literally nothing to do with definite descriptions. This stuck me as obviously true and wondered - and still do - what all the fuss was, and is about.

In this phrase, “Playing a game consists in moving objects about on a surface according to certain rules . . .”, the reference to board games is "on a surface", not "according to certain rules". — Metaphysician Undercover

There is no textual evidence to support arbitrarily cleaving the phrase in two. Speaking of 'stretchs of creative interpretation'. Nothing in the rest of the post refers to the PI either, so is entirely neglectable.

§31:

§31 continues the theme, already developed previously, that an ostensive explanation requires knowing something about the kind of thing that is being pointed out:

§31: "The words “This is the king” (or “This is called ‘the king’”) are an explanation of a word only if the learner already ‘knows what a piece in a game is’. That is, if, for example, he has already played other games, or has watched ‘with understanding’ how other people play - and similar things". (emphasis in the original).

However, one thing that might be missed - because people have been anticipating alot - is that §31 is actually the first time in the PI that Wittgenstein actually begins to discuss 'rules' explicitly at all. So far, rules were mentioned only back in §3, where, interestingly, Witty actually objects to characterizing games in terms of rules, and says that such a characterization is a 'restricted' one that doesn't capture the generality of games. To recall:

§3: "It is as if someone were to say, “Playing a game consists in moving objects about on a surface according to certain rules . . .” - and we replied: You seem to be thinking of board games, but they are not all the games there are. You can rectify your explanation by expressly restricting it to those games."

That ought to put us on alert to the fact that rules are not - so far at least - crucial elements in Wittgenstein's conception of games, and hence, language. This is something that will be developed here in §31 even more. §31 beings by characterizing a situation in which in order to understand a specific ostensive act ("This is the king”), one must know the rules before hand. What is being illustrated here is again, the need for prior knowledge before ostensive explanation can 'work':

§31: "When one shows someone the king in chess and says “This is the king”, one does not thereby explain to him the use of this piece a unless he already knows the rules of the game except for this last point: the shape of the king". So far, so good.

Importantly however, this prior knowledge, while it can be of rules, is not necessarily or always of them. This is what the second paragraph (which begins "However, one can....") aims to bring out, which, among other things, aims to show that rules are just one kind of 'prior knowledge' needed for ostensive explanation to function: "And in that case it is so, not because the person to whom we give the explanation already knows rules, but because, in another sense, he has already mastered a game." There is 'another sense', quite apart from the knowledge of rules, in which one can have the prior knowledge necessary to understand ostensive explanations.

As with §3, Witty is here circumscribing (limiting) the role or importance of rules as necessary elements in the understanding of ostensive explanations. While acknowledging their necessity in some circumstances, the appeal to rules does not exhaust all of them. The rest of §31, which doesn't discuss rules at all, simply goes over some of the same ground as before: the need to have a certain kind of knowledge before ostensive explanations can work.