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

Part of the problem about asking after the 'fasifiability' of free will is that it's not even entirely clear that the very concept itself is intelligible - let alone falsifiable. One might ask, for instance, who or what exactly is the subject of free will - that is, what exactly is the 'thing' or 'person' that is excercising free will? Even phrasing it in terms of things or persons is already to bias the inquiry. What theory of subjectivity is involved here? Further, one might ask what kind of freedom is involved in free will? It is commonly understood to be a matter of choice ('freedom of choice', or the liberum arbitrium), but this is not the only way to understand it (indeed, this understanding of freedom was only introduced relatively late into philosophy, and was done so on theological grounds - credit to Augustine), and there are rich, alternative traditions of thought for which freedom is something else entirely (Arendt, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty to name but a few). Until the very conceptual cogency of 'free will' is clarified (and it is not at all obvious that it can be), falsifiability remains, at best, a derivitive or secondary issue.

Ugh, white people didn't just 'side' with black people as if some two-bit video game. They 'sided' with them over specific political injuries and injustices - lack of political freedom, restrictions on movement, publicly available opportunity (education, employment, access to public facilities, etc). I.e. things white people already had. They weren't fighting for 'black supremacy' (regardless of some of the rhetoric). For your symmetry to work, you'd have to look for political goods that black people have that white people don't. Which of course is bullocks. What an absolute farce of a question.

This is what happens when you have a vapid, shallow understanding of 'equality' that doesn't take into account existing power differentials by which equality actually, really functions in the real world.

One may or may not excercise a right, and to not excercise it is not to violate it. The Miranda right to 'remain silent' upon arrest is not broken when you speak, for example, but simply not excercized. It would be broken if you were forced or compelled to speak under duress.

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

I just want to explore its logical implications, one of which seems to allow for superstitions to be true. — TheMadFool

No it does not, not in the slightest. The so-called butterfly effect must be thought of in terms of the dynamic systems in which it comes to be an effect at all. The idea is that dynamic systems are defined by - among other things - certain thresholds or 'tipping points', beyond which the system will qualitatively change in behaviour (a weather system 'tips' from a fine day to a hurricane, for example). The 'butterfly effect' is what happens when a crucial variable (wind speed, temperature, air pressure, or something along those lines) 'tips' beyond the threshold required by that qualitative change to happen. This change in variable may be tiny, but it may be enough to set a whole train of events into motion.

A nice concrete example of this is given by Mark Granovetter when he asks us to imagine "100 people milling around in a square - a potential riot situation. Suppose their riot thresholds are distributed as follows: there is one individual with threshold 0, one with threshold 1, one with threshold 2, and so on up the last individual with threshold 99. There is a uniform distribution of thresholds. The outcome is clear and could be described as a 'domino' effect: the person with threshold 0, the 'instigator,' engages in riot behaviour - breaks a window, say. This activates the person with threshold 1; the activity of these two people then activates the person with threshold 2, and so on, until all 100 people have joined. ... Now perturb this distribution as follows. Remove the individual with threshold 1 and replace him by one with threshold 2. By all of our usual ways of describing groups of people, the two crowds are essentially identical. But the outcome in the second case is quite different - the instigator riots, but there is now no one with threshold 1, so the riot ends at that point, with one rioter." (Granovetter, Threshold models of Collective Behaviour).

The idea is that a tiny change may result not only in radically different outcomes, but also in dramatically disproportionate ones. This 'disproportionality' speaks to fact that the causality at work here is 'non-linear' ('1 unit' of cause may result in '10 units' of effect - an exponential, rather than linear or geometric rate of growth), which is one thing that the term 'butterfly effect' is meant to capture. In any case, there's nothing 'superstitious' about any of this, and it's a awful, silly mistake to think there is.

When I see a new word being used, I still don't get the meaning. I end up referencing the dictionary to know what the word means. — Harry Hindu

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

But meaning is not at all exhausted by definitions. In fact definitions ought to be perhaps the last thing one ought to consider when thinking about meaning at all, such is the awfulness of thinking of meaning in that way.

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

The problem you posed isn't one.

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

No.

As if meaning is a purely epistemic issue...

Surprised that you're entertaining this at all Banno.

Consistency of use just is conventionality, — John

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

This is a strawman, as I haven't stated or even implied anything like what you are suggesting here. — John

The examples you gave are completely meaningless unless they are given meaning as being equivalents to words as conventionally used in some language or other. — John

Seems to me like you're backpeddling on what you meant by convention (here you qualify it as that which is 'used in some language or another'), but OK, sure.

Nevertheless, if there happens to be a general context where the request for a "green leaved plant" is meant to be understood to have the specific point mentioned above, then it might come to be expected that the predicate "green..." will be used in that way whenever such a general context reoccurs. This use will thus come to be conventionalized. And from that point on, the expression will be misused, and not merely misunderstood, when someone misinterprets it in that general context. What has happened, effectively, after the use has become conventionalized is that what was formerly a route from apprehension of the requester's intention to the apprehension of the (occasion sensitive) meaning of her utterance, now has become a route from the apprehension of the (conventional) meaning of her words to the apprehension of her communicative intention. — Pierre-Normand

Yeah, this is a lovely genetic account of how meanings become sedimented and ossified, as it were, such that the grounds of their coming-to-mean become hidden and covered over. And I take Witty's project in the PI as an attempt, among other things, to show just how muddled philosophy can get when one approaches language from the angle of the already-established. Cavell too hones in on this when he writes that "I think that what Wittgenstein ultimately wishes to show is that it makes no sense at all to give a general explanation for the generality of language, because it makes no sense at all to suppose words in general might not recur, that we might possess a name for a thing (say "chair" or "feeding") and yet be willing to call nothing (else) "the same thing". (The Claim of Reason, p. 188)

It's a very Kantian move, a kind of Critique of Pure Language (complete with it's own account of (grammatical) transcendental illusions!: 'language on holiday', etc), which I always thought would in fact make for a fitting subtitle to the PI.

You're right of course, I mean, who, on a philosophy forum, would associate 'language is use' with either Wittgenstein or meaning? The bombshells keep landing! And snippy? Me? Never!

You're talking about the conventional meaning of a word... — Srap Tasmaner

Why yes, in a thread discussing Wittgenstein's conception of meaning, I am speaking about conventional meanings.

I can only hope the shock of this revelation doesn't incapacitate you.

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

Maybe if you could give me an example of each, that would be clearer: an example of an already-established use in English that is not what you would call a grammatical regularity (I assume you mean this in a wide sense); and an example of a grammatical regularity in English that is not an already-established use. (Since you use "regularity" in one and "use" in the other, I did too, but that's not an endorsement.)

It's a measure of my confusion that I have absolutely no idea what your examples will be. I hope it's plain as day to you. — Srap Tasmaner

Oh dear, I must have expressed myself badly indeed. By alreday-established use I simply mean something like the dictionary definition of words. To the extent that the dictionary catalogs the ways in which words are used in society, definitions in a dictionary might be considered exemplars of already-established uses - i.e. what I'm referring to when I speak of convention (and recall that dictionaries are always playing 'catch-up' to societal employment of words: definitions are added as words are used in novel ways; in other words dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive).

The only point I've been trying to make is that when Witty says 'meaning is use', he does not mean 'use' in the above way. The PI is simply more than an utterly banal exhortation to read the dictionary to figure out tbe meanings of words.

But to give an example of an 'unconventional' use of language, consider the wonderful emerging trend of treating nouns as verbs. I have in mind interrogatives like 'Do you gym?' ('do you go to the gym?), or 'are you pubbing later?' ('are you going to the pub later?') - or even declarations like 'let's Game of Thrones!' ('let's watch Game of Thrones now'). The reason why the former phrases, while 'unconventional', are perfectly understandable, is because the 'nouns' occupy the place of verbs in the phrases above, and can be treated as such with little to no issue. There is a consistency to the grammar of the use, even though the use itself is unconventional. And Witty's point, among others, is that so long as, within a specific form-of-life, a certain grammatical consistency is retained, novel, unconventional ('non-dictionary') uses of words will have meaning. One can, with help of these examples, learn 'how to go on' using nouns as verbs. The use is conventionalizable (perhaps dictionaries might include this new use in future editions), even though it is not, at this point, conventional.

Again, if by conventional you simply mean grammatically regular, than sure, it's 'conventional'. But as I've noted for about the third time now, this was never what I was arguing against to begin with. I've been speaking about 'conventional' as distinct from the 'unconventional', the non-established, the abnormal, the outside-the-regular. If you want to say that convention of use exists at the moment of it's birth - so there is no 'unconventional' by dint of every use being conventional as a matter of principle - then you are talking about something different from me. At the very least, you'd be speaking about 'convention' in a very idiosyncratic manner (no one 'on the street' would call Cakese conventional), one I'm not sure John is talking about either. But let's let him speak for himself.

You may be satisfied, but I seriously doubt John will be. I think he would expect to see something that counts as a use of Cakese, while having no link to the conventions of Cakese. — Srap Tasmaner

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

But the most important word in here is "consistent." What you teach someone when you teach them a language, the practice you invite them to join, is precisely the consistent and regular actions (not only the utterances, but the matching of utterance to occasion, and so on) that constitute its use, in short, its conventions. No regularity, no convention, and no language. — Srap Tasmaner

But I have been quite clear, in almost every one of my posts, that by convention I mean already-established use (of language), and not grammatical regularity. If you want to call grammatical regularity 'convention', then so be it, but then we are not talking about the same thing, and there is no disagreement.

This is a tough sell because it's extremely difficult to imagine the "no other terms" part. I think we all reach in our minds for some foundational gestures we pretend are transparent and self-grounding. — Srap Tasmaner

I actually agree with this for the most part. My 'no other terms' qualifier is meant to apply to spoken or written language. I would however, modify your comment here to say not that we 'reach in our minds', but that we 'reach in our bodies', as it were. While it's not something I've mentioned yet for parsimony's sake, I'm a strong believer in the thesis that our elementary experiences of meaning are bodily. That is, what we 'share' to begin with our quite simply our physiognomies: we are (to a large extent) laterally symmetric, forward oriented, motile, and gravity bound beings with limbs for grasping and a swivelling neck, and the way in which our physiognomies interact with the affordances of our environment provides us with our 'initial', shared coordinates of meaning. It is the environmental relations we establish by means of our interactions with it that provide the germinal 'fund' of meaning out of which further meaning grows*. There's lots more to say on this, but I'll keep it short.

As far the this thread is concerned, again, one can call this shared physiographical ground a 'convention', but this would be a lexical stretch, and again, is not, and has never been, what I am arguing against.

*As argued by those like Lakoff and Johnson, David Olsen, David McNeill, Maxine Sheets-Johnston, and others (and anticipated, in fact, by Witty's famous line about a lion that could speak being totally unintelligible to us).

But by claiming ... that a few strings and gestures and their translated meanings is all it takes to have a language — Srap Tasmaner

Perhaps you could point out where, exactly, I make this claim. A direct quote would be nice. I did provide a couple of examples of "a 'new usage' that bears absolutely no association or link whatsoever to the conventional usages of the time in which it arose" (John's request) - which is what I was asked for, but if you think I meant these examples as 'all that it takes to have a language' then I'm afraid you're reading things that aren't there.

You're mistaken if you think I've missed that. In fact my entire point has been that there is no genuinely private use in the sense that even your 'private' ( 'private' only insofar as they might involve you and no one else) examples obviously rely on conventional public usage for them to have any meaning even to you. — John

Eh, then you are using words in a different way than I am. That's OK, so long as we're clear. I'll only add here that this is not how Wittgenstein employs these terms, and insofar as this is a thread roughly about him, I'll continue to speak of idiosyncrasy rather than 'private' language in this case.

the examples you gave are completely meaningless unless they are given meaning as being equivalents to words as conventionally used in some language or other. — John

Unless? But this is only true because we're talking over the internet in a limited way (and it is also you begging the question). If I had some cake, and you were in the same room as me, and neither of us could speak to each other in terms other than in my made-up-on-the-spot language (assuming I was consistent with grammar), I wager you'd 'get' my invitation to eat cake eventually (this would be the 'rough ground' of language - life and it's being lived, language bound up with action - that secures meaning). This is how we teach children, no? Does it matter if we teach them with an already-established - i.e. conventional - language, or not?

Incidentally, it is just this rarefied, intellectualist, and 'thin' approach to language - in which meaning can only ever find its ground in more language ("meaningless... unless they are given meaning as being equivalents to words..."), shorn of any reference to human practice, lived context, and worldly action - in short, the entire order of the performative - that Witty rightly spent his entire late career arguing against. A particularly 'philosophical' failing.

What would lead me to think the criterion had been met in this case? — Srap Tasmaner

Nothing. At least, that's the whole point: these criteria must be 'lived', and the only thing that that guarantees their uptake (or not) is the 'form-of-life', the 'whirl of organism' in which they operate. Meaning is use means: look at the practices in which language is embedded in ("the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life"), and language or meaning cannot be grasped apart from that activity (see again the quote I put up from Cavell a few pages back: "Nothing insures that this projection will take place... just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, etc etc..."

This is probably the hardest point to grasp in Witty: the immanence of 'criteria of meaning' to their employment. And this is what is at stake in the discussion of rule following, in which there is a way of grasping a rule that is 'not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call "obeying the rule" and "going against it" in actual case'. This is why I said all the stakes of the PI are condensed in this one passage.

The latter.

At a minimum one would have to grant that the phrases and gestures have a grammar particular to them (such that there would be different kinds of lexemes employed), and that this grammar would be transposable to other words or gestures that could belong to that same language. As Cavell puts it, following Wittgenstein, a language is at work where one can "learn and teach words in certain contexts, and [where] we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts."

This capacity to be to 'projected' into further contexts (because we know what 'kind' of things we are talking about - the grammar of a language) is what minimally distinguishes a use of language as opposed to language being 'on holiday' (which is not 'misuse', as some in this thread have spoken about, but simply, not a use at all) (c.f. PI §371/373: "Essence is expressed in grammar" / "Grammar tells what kind of object anything is".). Crucially, it's irrelevant whether or not the use of language under discussion has been established through convention or not.

Call it what you like.

You misunderstand what is at stake though: the entire point is that it is a category error to speak of 'private' use. Use, by nature, is 'public' (which is not the same as shared or conventional). My uses may be idiosyncratic, but they are not private, by dint of their being uses of language at all. In any case, I'm not sure how you've at all demonstrated that meaning cannot be 'isolated from conventional use'. That one must translate, say, Japanese into English for you to understand does not entail the rather absurd conclusion that Japanese 'cannot be isolated from English'. And what I did above was no different to translation.

Why did you think we were discussing shared use? I don't believe either you or I even once used the word 'shared', nor any of it's cognates. And, given that I just told you quite explicitly what those phrases mean, I'm not sure either how you think they are meaningless.

hzhxehd hskidkdd bskslkc kfofeudh dkdoepe jwuewownzv aajn'malnq llllllpealaf

This means something like "let's eat cake".

As does the phrase - in the way I use it - "to be, or not to be, that is the question".

As does a particular series of foot wiggles I'm doing right now, which, if only you were here to see, would entail a great deal of cake for you.

--

These examples are facetious of course, but they are not only facetious...

To be lazy, I meant it quite literally - you didn't, in affirming that new usages must maintain a 'link' to convention, actually provide a reason to believe that. In this thread at least, it remains an assertion. Perhaps you might elaborate on the initial claim?

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

The object of agreement seems to me to be the same sort of thing as the understanding Wittgenstein talked about when he said that there is a way to understand a rule that is not an interpretation. And it is regress blocking in the same manner. — Pierre-Normand

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

The book sounds interesting too, although I'm actually pretty unfamiliar with the 'analytic' reception of Witty outside of a few select readers here and here (Cavell and Kripke). Tbh, my favourite readings have come from the space of, funnily enough, political philosophy. Linda Zerilli, Chantal Mouffe, Hannah Pitkin, Cavell, and even Zizek have, more than any other readers, made me appreciate the power and the singularity of Witty's thought. The 'mainstream' of Witty scholarship has been largely outside my ken, unfortunately.

. And is there any word or phrase that is not "conventionalizable"? There is only the conventional and the unconventional, as well as right and wrong ways to use words. — Luke

But of course - everything that Witty designates as 'language on holiday' or 'language as an idling engine', etc: these are uses of language where there is no possible way to grasp a rule regarding 'how to go on', where differences no longer make a difference, and there is no possible language-game to which a particular use of language belongs. This distinction simply does not - and cannot - map onto a distinction between 'conventional' (already-established) and 'nonconventional' (not-yet-established) uses of language. After all, it's clear that instances of unconventional language use still mean things, and one can quite easily learn an unconventional idiom and employ it quite successfully.

This sounds awfully close to defining "use" as simply making sounds and writing scribbles. If any scribble or sound can mean anything at anytime, then use would simply making scribbles or sounds to refer to anything. Any scribble or sound is "conventionizable". "Conventionizable" isn't even a word. You simply made up a new string of scribbles and ascribed it a meaning via your intent. Most of us knew that you really meant (intended) "conventionalized", which is a word. When there are other words that already have the meaning you intend, then making up a new string of scribbles to mean the same thing would be redundant and makes language more complex and confusing. — Harry Hindu

It'd be better if you didn't waste your energies on me - your posts in this thread are beneath consideration, and this one especially.

If a "convention" is simply "a way in which something is usually done" - which presumably includes the ways in which we are usually taught to do things - then I don't quite understand how it is much different to your (or Cavell's) contrasting class of "communally cultivated habits" and the like. — Luke

The object of agreement is different. For Wittgenstein as for Cavell, there is 'agreement in the form of life' at stake. It is not an agreement with respect to the conventional (by which I mean 'already-established') use(s) of language. That's the key difference. There are two analytic axes at work here: a language game and the form of life in which that language game operates. 'Agreement' operates at the latter level, as it were.

Witt wanted us to observe how language is used among living humans in order to grasp how words come to have meaning. — Mongrel

Yeah, but the really important point is not only that we must observe how language is used among living human beings, but equally that meaning in language is nonetheless not tethered to these actually-existing-practises. There is the capacity to inaugurate new uses, new meanings that may very well break with 'convention' - all the while being amenable - in principle - to becoming conventional. Or to simply go back to my original point: a language-game is not a 'convention' if by 'convention' we understand an actually-existing-use of language by a community of real life speakers.

Wittgenstein never actually speaks of communally agreed usages though. And when the topic of agreement is broached, what is agreed upon is a 'form of life', which is in turn qualified as a kind or matter of 'activity' ("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" §23 // "It is in their language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life" §241). Again, despite the popular misconception, neither convention nor 'communally agreed useages' play much of a role - if any - in Witty's understanding of meaning and language (the same can't be said of something like 'communally cultivated habits, dispositions, affects, and activities' and all the stuff Cavell puts under the heading of the 'whirl of organism').

The misattribution tends to stem from Witty's insistence that language is a public phenomenon, but the 'publicness' of language refers to its performative nature, its being a practice and an activity, and not it's inscription into a community or 'a' public.

What grounds meaning in his (quite agreeable view) is not convention (which is easy to think), but "forms of life" far more generally, like what is universal to the human condition, and meaning is only transferable, or made up of not only grammar, but subjective judgment which have to match, which come from living, and experience. So that, language is as universal as the form of life in which the meaning arises from. This is why a lion wielding all of the bestest grammar, would still be unintelligible. — Wosret

You might like Cavell's writing on this: "We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expended, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of humor and of significance and fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation - all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls "forms of life.". Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrifying." (Cavell, The Claim of Reason)

Which is more or less an expanded gloss of §241 & §242 of the PI: "It is in their language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life/ It is not only agreement in definitions, but also (odd as it may sound) agreement in judgements that is required for communication by means of language."

If you mean he wasn't talking about any particular set of conventions, — Mongrel

Nope, I mean that conventions as such - if by this we mean already-established uses of language - are quite literally irrelevant to Wittgenstein's account of meaning. Or, as I said, what is at stake is 'conventionalizability' and not conventions. Or better yet: conventionalizability, use, and meaning are co-eval: to mean something with language is to use language in such a way that it can be made out according to a convention, or again better, made out according to a rule (Witty almost always speaks in terms of 'rules' and almost never in terms of 'convention'); which is not to say that it must 'follow' an (already established) rule - this being a distinction Witty makes clearly in the Blue Books where he speaks of the difference between 'a process being in accordance with a rule' and 'a process involving a rule'.

Commenting on the above passage Linda Zerilli comments: "Whereas the latter refers to actions that are explicitly followed by subjects engaged in a particular practice... the former speaks to what an observer of any practice might say when asked to explain what is being done". This again speaks to the 'rule-lizability' of use, not merely following established rules. Stanley Cavell is even more explicit when he says that the whole point of the rule following discussion is to "indicate how inessential the 'appeal to rules' is as an explanation of language." The entire discussion of the so-called 'rule following paradox' in the PI (along with it's 'resolution') is meant to bring this out. As is all the discussion of teaching and learning, to arrive at the point where one 'knows how to go on' (i.e. without rules or conventions being spelled out each time).

Or put differently again, the whole of the PI operates at the level of 'principle' and not 'fact' - meaning operates in language to the extent that the use of language accords in principle to some rule or another. Whether or not there is in fact a rule of that kind is irrelevant. Which is why everytime someone reads Wittgenstein as appealing to 'conventional use' to explain meaning in language, they misunderstand the point entirely.