Of course the usage/meaning of words changes with context. Well know example is "John shot some bucks". What exactly went on? Did John go hunting or did John lose some money at Las Vegas? We need context to determine the meaning. But the underlying "reality" (AKA "objective truth", AKA "state of affairs", etc, etc) of what occurred to John did not change. — EricH

I tend to agree with you. I understand opposing views and would once have argued for them, but now they seem more clever than serious. Anyone who disagrees with you would seem to be telling you that you are getting some state of affairs wrong. A slier opponent might just suggest that his approach is better...for no reason. Or if a reason is given, it's hard to imagine some state of affairs not being invoked. That thinghood == functionality or that it's turtles interpretation all the way down. Typically the superstitious concept (reality, the thing considered apart from its purpose) in employed in the theory that denies it.

To be clear I'm not saying that the atoms of the knife or its measurable qualities are the thing itself. The notion of 'what is the case' is intrinsically murky, 'beneath' our ability to decisively analyze it while making that attempt possible.

Again, if we build a model that describes what we see, that model can never explain why we see, because at no point we are modeling the modeler, we're just modeling our view of the modeler. We're just finding correlations within our experiences, how could they tell us why we experience? If we find correlations within a movie, how could they tell us how the TV works? — leo

This is a great issue. 'Correlations within our experiences' along with metaphorical enframing seem roughly to be what we have.

What is the deeper 'why' that you mention? What is the 'why' that can't be answered with some useful or comforting pattern in or metaphorical framing of experience? Is this 'why ?' just a lyrical expression of wonder? Is it a perception of the limit of explanation as it is usually conceived? It's as if the question pretends to want an explanation and yet demands something beyond any conceivable explanation. This same idea can be expressed by denying that so-called explanations really explain with any depth.

Since explain is such a common and useful word, I like the first way of framing it. 'Why is there something?' or 'why experience?' points out the darkness that borders the light of our little campfire. Because it is useless and maybe difficult to grasp, it's easy to shrug off. Addressing the OP, the question I have in mind 'must' be a 'blind spot' of science (and maybe philosophy). It's hard to imagine a theory of any content that isn't finding connections between entities or reframing our situation metaphorically. Is the blind spot an infinitesimal hole poked in our cognition/world?

Is nothing amiss when 'thought' and 'speech' have to be defined? Aren't we repeating the issue with 'exist'? We already know how to use these words.

A few phrases that we cough up on demand don't begin to do justice to the complexity in our effortless employment of these words when we aren't tangled up in a peculiar game.

In my opinion, Wittgenstein wanted to use the word "grammar" to refer to the pre-theoretical, intuitive, ineffable and phenomenological aspects of meaning - but found himself unable to do so — sime

I agree, except he succeeded well enough for you to grasp what he was aiming at.

Yes, I never stated nor believe Wittgenstein's whole project should be discounted. ... These are all jargony terms and have to be clarified in their contexts. I don't believe every jargony term is senseless. It has their uses. — schopenhauer1

Just to be clear, I wasn't reading you as anti-Wittgenstein.

Also I'm not anti-jargon in general. Jargon is just one of those things that can go wrong. Seems to me like a question of targeting. What is important? What is secondary? Is anything really being said? Is it being dressed up to look more difficult and novel than it is?

I'm reading Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff). It's great. Lakoff doesn't connect what he's saying to the philosophers he reminds me of, but the book is philosophy in its ambition and content. It's like Heidegger w/o a trace of the questionable style. It's not that jargony philosophy hasn't been great. It's just impressive when someone can employ the words already at hand. It's like they are resisting the urge to sign everything.

In other words, is all epistemology or is there ever room for accounting for an ontology? — schopenhauer1

Can we separate ontology and epistemology? If I make ontological claims, you will want me to justify them. But it's hard to imagine justifying anything without some things. And kind of system has to be in place for us to talk epistemology or ontology? What do we assume (though not clearly or consciously) in order to debate anything theoretical? In this case at least that we share in the meaning well enough of 'ontology' and 'epistemology' in this living context.

"A is a physical object" is a piece of instruction which we give only to someone who doesn't yet understand either what "A" means, or what "physical object" means. Thus it is instruction about the use of words, and "physical object" is a logical concept. (Like colour, quantity,...) And that is why no such proposition as: "There are physical objects" can be formulated.
...,
It is quite sure that motor cars don't grow out of the earth. We feel that if someone could
believe the contrary he could believe everything that we say is untrue, and could question
everything that we hold to be sure.

But how does this one belief hang together with all the rest?

We should like to say that someone who could believe that does not accept our whole system of verification.

This system is something that a human being acquires by means of observation and instruction. I intentionally do not say "learns."
...

If my name is not L.W., how can I rely on what is meant by "true" and "false"?

If something happened (such as someone telling me something) calculated to make me
doubtful of my own name, there would certainly also be something that made the grounds of these doubts themselves seem doubtful, and I could therefore decide to retain my old belief.
...
Admittedly, if you are obeying the order "Bring me a book", you may have to check whether
the thing you see over there really is a book, but then you do at least know what people mean by a "book"; and if you don't you can look it up, - but then you must know what some other word means.

And the fact that a word means such-and-such, is used in such-and-such a way, is in turn an
empirical fact, like the fact that what you see over there is a book.

Therefore, in order for you to be able to carry out an order there must be some empirical fact about which you are not in doubt. Doubt itself rests only on what is beyond doubt.
...
"If my memory deceives me here it can deceive me everywhere."

If I don't know that, how do I know if my words mean what I believe they mean?

"If this deceives me, what does 'deceive' mean any more?"

What can I rely on?

I really want to say that a language-game is only possible if one trusts something
(I did not say "can trust something"). — On Certainty

Why just this morning I made breakfast. I ground up some coffee beans, made the coffee, poured some cold cereal in a bowl, added skim milk, ate it - and I also drank some coffee. And in all of this I did not once use any words whose meaning was embedded in it’s context of usage. — EricH

I relate to the attitude expressed above.

It's not that I think that meaning isn't embedded. I think I understand what people mean by that. I guess the issue is whether it's used as a pointer to what we all already know or something clever and elusive. Perhaps a better approach is just listening to ourselves in real life. Theories are fine, but when it comes to meaning we aren't exactly locked outside of the laboratory.

Discarding has no comparison to refutation when it comes to argument. Discarding is a cowardly retreat — Merkwurdichliebe

Think what this means, though. How much time would you give to refuting the 'lizard people' conspiracy theory? A little more realistically, how willing are you to wade into various proofs of the existence of god? Are you in suspense until you do so? Is it a cowardly retreat to recognize the futility of certain approaches? And then to recognize the futility of trying to show this futility within that approach? Refutation of the flawed approach within the flawed approach is just confusion.

In this context I agree with @fresco in terms of attitude, but they are laying down one more system that depends on idiosyncratic uses of words that already work just fine. If the gist is a rejection of armchair science, then what is needed is paint thinner and not another coat of theory (unlearning, discarding).

For me, the import of this discussion is that I assert 'existence' to be on the same level of every other concept which humans denote by a socially acquired languge in specific behavioral contexts. — fresco

This is a hefty thesis. Is it not better to shrug off the handwringing of those who in other modes know better? Who really know how to use the word 'exist' already?

For me it's not that Rorty finally gets things right but rather that he had the right attitude. The attempt to prove the futility of X seems as futile as X itself. A certain approach is discarded, not refuted.

Normal everyday common language users do not get lost in mistaken accounts of what they're doing, unless they are unknowingly misled into such cognitive dissonance. — creativesoul

Maybe they/we are misled, but I think it's more a question of character than intellect. I mean that we get attached to certain games, not language games but personality games that happen within language. We are deaf to those outside that game. (In that game there are friends, foes, and those that don't fit the narrative --usually the ones talking sense in retrospect.) If our fever cools and we step outside, we suddenly understand all the critiques we ignored at the time.

No one will ever take Cantor's paradise away from us, but we may just lose that special feeling and walk out.

Does anyone here actually doubt whether or not anything can exist prior to our talking about it? — creativesoul

I don't think anyone really doubts that.

But the situation is strange if someone tries to grasp it conceptually rather than practically. I'm in a world, and yet this world is 'in' my consciousness. It's a snake eating its own tail.

'Life is a dream.' Does this not resonate? 'We are ripples in the nothingness.' Is this the thoughtcrime AKA language on holiday?

Let's grant that the universe will churn on in the absence of life. But it's hard for us to call that real with the same conviction, because there's no creature left to see it or give a damn.

It is no wonder that the value of philosophy proper has been considered on a steady decline for so long now by the average joe. — creativesoul

Strip away all the fancy specialist terms, and I think The Average Joe can and does get into these issues.

The problem, if there is one, is that it's relatively easy and it doesn't pay the bills. It's nice to fire up philosophy as the gee-whiz machine. Non-intellectual types like to get stoned and talk weird stuff. Just about everyone loved The Matrix.

Beyond the gee-whiz offerings, there's also identity to be had from philosophy. A person reads Plato or Nietzsche or Epictetus (or ?) for an idea of how to live, who to be. Monkey see, monkey maybe do. The more ordinary sort are happy with Jay-Z's autobiography. In terms of the itch scratched, it's the same phenomenon. Find some of it on the 'Philosophy' shelf at BAM! There are subconversations about Life with their own inside jokes and keywords. TPF is centered around one of many.

Then there's the stuff where folks drone on about the essence of a proposition,etc. You mentioned Wittgenstein. Who exactly was he griping at? His own obsessiveness? Not Weininger or Kraus. Not Tagore. And then who cares about Wittgenstein? All I mean is that he is as mummified memefied as Stirner. Put in a quarter & the speaker says 'language on holiday.' He's great, but it's not as if people weren't doing it right before him. Shaw was right when he said the first rule of style is having something to say. A certain kind of armchair science gets tangled up in its jargon as a way to hide its inanity from itself. Unravel the knot and there is often absurdity or triviality. This is the stuff our Joe sleeps through.

Is there even such a thing as a strictly random number. — Wittgenstein

Perhaps we have no choice but to fix some meaning for 'random.' One fascinating way to do this is:

Kolmogorov randomness defines a string (usually of bits) as being random if and only if it is shorter than any computer program that can produce that string. To make this precise, a universal computer (or universal Turing machine) must be specified, so that "program" means a program for this universal machine. A random string in this sense is "incompressible" in that it is impossible to "compress" the string into a program whose length is shorter than the length of the string itself. — Wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity

Its not a question of 'belief'. Its a fundamental later phenomenological pov which follows Kant's non accessibility of noumena and therefore discards 'noumena' as vacuous, and which accepts Nietsche's rejection of any difference between 'description' and 'reality'. — fresco

The noumena issue does lead to some ugly complexities. But the idea of reality apart from our descriptions seems to be baked in to the way human beings talk. Philosophers try to tell one another how it is, what's really going on. If we insist that there is no way that it really is, then we are nevertheless trying to say how it really is. 'The way it really is....is that there is no way it really is.'

The correspondence theory of truth crystallizes something like the phenomenon of us all being in a 'world' together (the same world, the same reality.) This 'world' is not some crisp object but more like the 'primordial' situation of humans talking to one another.

It seems to me that there is some continuity in attitude. It's as if there is a type of personality that is anti-metaphysical and anti-religious on a gut level. Then the game becomes justifying the assertion that such talk is meaningless, confused, untrustworthy, decadent, life-hating, etc.

Saying, "Wittgenstein just isn't interested" is shoving off any philosophical debate into "it's just brute fact" which in that case, makes sense why people often put Witty under "non-philosophy" or "anti-philosophy".

Any speculation is shrugged off. Thus, all that's left is to describe various contexts of language use. Great, all debates off. Let's just shut the forum down, all philosophical inquiry should be under creative writing/religion sections, and we can focus on something else now. — schopenhauer1

These do seem like good criticisms of one questionable interpretation of Wittgenstein. For me the use of Wittgenstein is going through the issues again and eliminating some of them as pointless. A person is more wary of their tendency to say nothing important as if it were profound, drunk on the jingle of their words. After his basic linguistic insights are digested, his more metaphysical/mystical ideas in the TLP become more fascinating. You mention brute fact. Well perhaps we do eventually bump up against brute fact (and is this not an old issue in philosophy?)

Here's a quote that I hope addresses your concern. You are echoing Gellner's frustration, I think.

Throughout his career, Gellner depicted Wittgenstein as a relativist who claimed that all conceptual schemes are equally valid, and who therefore represents "one of the most bizarre and extreme forms of irrationalism of our time" (Gellner 1992: 121). To do this, he used a strict adherence to the fideist conception of Wittgenstein’s notions of "form of life" and "language-games," according to which these notions can be invoked in justifying any political, social or religious view. For Gellner, language-games are windowless monads that fight each other without even really knowing what they fight. He once claimed, when interviewed as an anthropologist, that the Wittgensteinian notion of a form of life "doesn’t make sense in a world in which communities are not stable and are not clearly isolated from each other" (Davis 1991: 65). Shortly before his death, he summed up his position on forms of life:

[T]he most important events of human history — the emergence of abstract doctrinal religion, the possibility of Reformations which invoke abstract truth against social practice, the possibility of an Enlightenment which does the same in secular terms, the emergence of a trans-cultural science confirmed by a uniquely powerful technology — all these facts show that thought is not limited by the form of life in which it occurs, but can transcend it.

(Gellner 1996: 671)

But Gellner never even tries to show exactly where Wittgenstein disagreed. He never stops to consider the possibility that the Wittgensteinian notion of "form of life" might include elements opposed to each other that interact and compete in the most complex ways. In an exceptionally conciliatory mood, he once wrote: "All that needs to be added to Wittgenstein’s view to the effect that concepts are legitimated by their role in the living system of which they are part, is … that this world contains more than one culture, and that the various cultures found in it differ quite a lot" (Gellner 1968d: 457). He never manages to show where Wittgenstein tries to deny or even play down this fact. Neither is there a sign in Words and Things of a realization that a Wittgensteinian language-game can be criticized, rejected or condemned in any other Wittgensteinian language-game, even one played within the same form of life. — link

Here's a quote from Wittgenstein's diary, too:

Are we dealing with mistakes and difficulties that are as old as language? Are they, so to speak, illnesses that are tied to a language’s use, or are they of a more special nature, peculiar to our civilization?

Or again: is the preoccupation with language, which permeates our whole philosophy, an age old move of all philosophizing //of all philosophy//, an age old struggle? Or, again, is this it: does philosophizing always waver between metaphysics and critique of language? — Wittgenstein

https://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/tuschano/writings/strange/