The concept "universe" is relative to me, the creature asking the question.

I may be part of the universe, but I can scrutinize it in a way that it seems unable to do, absent someone asking a question. — Manuel

Or us. It’s where we are.

A post or two in, it occurred to me that reversing the relational definition is probably the inevitable way in. We get the three usual ways to deal with the relational thing: one’s independent, the other’s independent, or they’re mutually dependent. Starting with science in mind, it feels natural to reach first for counting the external (objective, natural, public, manifest) as independent: this house defines a space and I am in a specific part of that, relative to the house; the grocery store has a known, fixed location, and I’m about a mile from there in some direction. That way of answering ‘where’ questions fails immediately for the universe.

The third option, I’m holding off on a bit.

The second option, taking ourselves as independent and thinking of location relative to us, seems to have some promise. I was confused at first that you and @Miller seemed almost immediately to start talking about solipsism, but it makes sense if that’s how you see starting from us.

I think I didn’t see solipsism here because I’m not allowing myself to assume that location is relational, or at least not relational in a way that I already understand.

I think we could start with ‘us’ and ‘where we are’, but there’s no need to rush past understanding what ‘where we are’ means. In essence I’ve been arguing that the title of the thread, “Where are we?”, is exactly the way into answering “Where is the universe?” by turning it into “Where is here?” first of all, and thinking about location (what is ‘here’?) this way first, but knowing that we’ll need to end up with a sense of location that also works for ‘there’ and ‘that stuff’ too. (Does it need to be the same sense? Unclear.)

@Manuel

Look at this way. My phone has GPS. It knows that it is somewhere, only operationally, only insofar as it knows where it is in relation to other things. My jacket does not have GPS, and knows neither where it is, nor that it is somewhere. But, unlike my phone, I know that I am somewhere even when I don’t know where that is. Now you can say that I always know a little about where I am, that I’m on Earth and so on, but do I seem to know even more than that: I know that I must be somewhere because I am spatial, and insofar as I am at all, I am located. What is that sense of being located, that’s what I want to get at, and what I think “Where is the universe?” can force you to confront. I don’t think you get to say that I know I must be located only in the sense of being located relative to other things, because we cannot claim already to understand what it means for those things to be located somewhere. And obviously we can’t say where the universe is in relation to anything else, but we can still say that it’s right here, or that it’s ‘all around us’.

But you‘re asking, “How I can know where I am?” aren’t you? And that’s another thing entirely.

So far we have:
(1) Where is everything?
(1a*) Where is everywhere?
(2) What does it mean for something to be somewhere, for anything to be anywhere?
(2a) What does it mean for me to be somewhere, to be anywhere?
(3) How can I know where I am?
(3a) How can I know where anything is?

The 3’s don’t seem to leave a lot of room for the sort of answers that the 1’s and 2’s might require. It’s hard to imagine an answer to a 3 as anything but ‘where-in-relation-to’. Why is that? Why is knowledge so insistently relational?

If I answer the question “Where am I?” with “here”, then presumably we can ask “How do I know that I am here?” If ‘here’ is simply relational, then that’s the same as asking “How do I know I am not there, for all values of there?” But that’s just another way of not facing up to the question. When you answer “Where are you?” with “Here,” you give no location, in one sense, not even a relational one; it’s like saying, “I am wherever I am”, or “I am wherever this place is” or even “I am in whatever this place is.” Is that a location? It’s not saying “nowhere”.

Or not: ‘wherever I am’ is also relational, but marks place by reference to me. We have the same answer available for ‘all of us’ or for ‘everything’. The universe, too, is wherever it is, and since we’re in it, that’s where we are. Or, maybe better, the universe is wherever we are.

Of course we’re going around in circles, which is not necessarily bad, but it feels like we keep running past points where the questions might connect to each other. If we could say, clearly, how we can know where we are, or know where anything is, would that tell us what ‘being somewhere’ is? If, for instance, the question, ‘how can we know’, has to be restricted to ‘how can we know in relation to (something else)’ — and, of course, we haven’t shown this yet — then would be entitled to say that ‘being somewhere’ is only ‘being somewhere (relative to something else)’? That is not clear to me at all.

One other question we passed over is “How do I know I am somewhere?” or “How do I know something is somewhere?” Not ‘what is its location?’ but just ‘that it (or I) have one’. I counted this as a non-question by saying it’s just a property of us, or other things, to have a location. And it doesn’t seem to be a property of the universe. But how do we know that? Is that something we know?

Open question, then, for me. How we know which sorts of things have locations, and which don’t, how we know what those locations are, or don’t, might help us understand what having a location is, or might not.

And so on. In absence of a relation to something else, you can't say to be anywhere. — Manuel

The question itself is “Where is the universe?” and so fails because it’s like asking “Where is everything?” or “Where is everywhere?” and neither of those leave anything to be related to.

But it’s curious that the title of the thread is not “Where is the universe?” but “Where are we?” (although the conversational emphasis would probably be “Where are we?”). So the question could be, “Where are we, in relation to everything?” which sounds a little different, a question about, as people say, ‘our place in the universe’, which is not a question about location at all.

And maybe the conversational emphasis is the right one. What does it mean to be the sort of thing that has a physical location? That’s a defining characteristic of us, but what does it mean to have a location? Can my having a location only be described in terms of the location of other things or beings that have a location? That still doesn’t say what it is for anything — those things, me, us — to have a location. The simplest way to block even thinking you can answer my location question by talking about the location of other things, is to ask “Where is everything?”

And that’s a very good question. Not ‘where am I in relation to (something else)’, but what is ‘being somewhere’?

And how do we explain the Olber's paradox if it really is infinite? — Echoes

I had forgotten about Olber’s paradox, so thanks for that.

Assuming our universe is finite, what lies beyond it's edge? Where is the universe located in the first place? What lies above and below the universe?
Even if we assume we're in a multiverse, what lies outside the multiverse? — Echoes

I like this question very much, even though it’s clearly incoherent. You could read up on cosmology and get some idea how cosmologists tame their intuitive sense of ‘space’ or ‘location’ so that they don’t get into this sort of mess, maybe learn some tricks for almost visualizing how it works, but the fact remains that the question itself is incoherent and you won’t ever get an answer to it. We have never been waiting for science to figure out where the universe is, so whatever cosmologists say, it won’t be that.

But it’s still a lovely question. Because we know it’s a question that cannot be answered, we have some new things to think about:

(1) Why would we think, at first, that we could answer such a question?
(2) Why is it so easy to ask a question that, we might say, makes no sense?
(3) Does the way the question fails tell us anything else interesting?

* And lots more, but that’s a place to start, not finish.

Haven’t you thought about the origins of logic? Wouldnt a primordial theory of Being have to begin with the conditions of possibility for logic rather than simply presuppose it as a starting point? — Joshs

That sounds like you’re invoking the ‘rule’ against explaining something in terms of itself — not so much a rule as a definition of failure — but you’re not, which is curious. (The ‘rule’ would be violated if you presupposed logic as a starting point in your primordial theory of logic, not Being.) But if logic can only be explained (or grounded, or theorized, or even primordially theorized) in terms of Being, and Being in terms of logic, then we would have circularity.

The word ‘presuppose’ is tricky though: the rule proscribes explaining something in terms of itself, not relying on it in your explanation. Using logic while explaining logic is not circular.

For instance, I cannot fix this hammer using this hammer (our no-circularity rule), but I can fix it using another hammer, or using anything else as a hammer. So far as logic is concerned, we’re talking about predication here. But it looks like there may be room for an analysis of hammers and hammering and things with which you can hammer — roughly, of the usability and intention-answering possibilities of things — which could function as an account of predication, rather than the other way around.

That only clearly gets you to phenomenology. But in Being and Time, this is the first step in an analysis of the being of things, right? Maybe it’s taking that step, from phenomenology to ontology, that most needs clarification.

Sometimes Quine is lumped in with the pragmatists, I'm not sure why. — Manuel

Because he said it himself, in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, and when asked about it over the years, he shrugged a lot. I think he was kind of drawn to the idea because he thought of science as a pragmatic enterprise, so it made sense that philosophy, being continuous with natural science, would be too. I think somewhere he says that, once he read him later, he felt closest to Dewey out of the classic trio, for just that reason.

You can defend the existence of the state without accepting some libertarian’s equating of the state with socialism. You can also defend socialism, but it’s opposed to libertarianism only insofar as it is one way of organizing the state.

FEMA is not the greatest example. It has gone through more reforms due to its failing responses than it has had successes. — NOS4A2

That’s not an argument that the trailers don’t count as help.

You could, if you were willing, argue that it’s less helpful ‘in the long run’ than letting people suffer the consequences of their poor choice of where to live. That’s still, before even getting to the other challenges of arguing such a position, which strike me as monumental, admitting that it is, to these people, in these circumstances, helpful.

If you could show that there is a performative contradiction in espousing libertarianism
— Srap Tasmaner

I did. — James Riley

I don’t think you did, at least not here.

I think it is true that the state can guarantee your ability to advocate for there being no state, among other things, and I think it’s true that providing such guarantees is one of the reasons people accept the necessity of state authority. Otherwise, only the strong have free speech.

Is that the same thing as socialism?

All we can be sure of is that they’ll take our money, they’ll spend it, but we don’t know whether it’s “helping others” or buying a politician’s neck-ties. — NOS4A2

Really? When FEMA shows up and gives you a trailer to live in because your house was destroyed by a hurricane, that looks a lot like help.

Libertarians are socialists who hate themselves for it, because they want an autonomy that comes with being a big guy, and they can't have it because they aren't big guys. They rely on the state to protect them from big guys and they hate it. Colonel Colt helped, but he can't make a libertarian hate themselves less. — James Riley

This ‘genealogical’ critique specifically doesn’t speak to whether libertarianism is a sound political philosophy. If you could show that the ideas of socialism are implicit in the ideas of libertarianism, that would be interesting. If you could show that there is a performative contradiction in espousing libertarianism — that you cannot do so without an unacknowledged commitment to socialism — that would be interesting.

One problem with this sort of ‘analysis’ is that it invites more of the same: how hard would it be for me to pass right over whatever you’re saying and instead ‘diagnose’ your attraction to this sort of critique? Would you find that a satisfying way for me to engage what you have to say about libertarians? Even when grounded in a thorough historical reconstruction, this sort of thing only makes sense if truth is off the table. It is seductive but dangerous, and we’d be better off if Nietzsche had never thought of it.

There are a couple things to note about this. One is that "Don't you have a headache?" is a yes-or-no question...
— Srap Tasmaner

Wouldn't we say it is more in the sense of "Hey, I thought you had a headache."--as in confused, requesting confirmation; rather than a question (despite the question mark). — Antony Nickles

Which goes to my point that we often distinguish — and need to distinguish, for conversations to make any sense — the literal, conventional meaning of what we say from the use we are making of it in the circumstances. "Don't you have a headache?" does not mean "Hey, I thought you had a headache" or "I am confused about your headache status," but we can use it that way.

Wittgenstein shows us that all language is essentially behavioural, social and public, so the grammar of the word "know" is based on behavioural verifications, not on inner objects. — Luke

I'll grant you can get that out of §246. But there's a couple peculiarities to that remark I'd like to ask about.

One is that Wittgenstein suggests that to say of me that I know I'm in pain is just to say that I'm in pain. But then if "He's in pain" is not nonsense, how can "He knows he's in pain" be nonsense? Do they have the same use or not?

The argument seems to go like this: the trouble with "I know I'm in pain" is that you would only choose this expression over "I'm in pain" if you have a mistaken understanding of the privacy of our sensations. You may only end up saying (what amounts to) "I'm in pain", but you are trying (and failing) to say something else, and that something else is nonsense.

But that means it's something like your intention that makes "I know I'm in pain" nonsense. Wittgenstein worries an awful lot about how we picture things working, how we understand them, for someone who's supposed to be a behaviorist.

This much is true: it makes sense to say about other people that they doubt whether I am in pain; but not to say it about myself.

And I have one little question about the last paragraph. Everyone seems to take this as an anticipation of On Certainty and finds it completely convincing.

But suppose instead of the §246 we have, we had this:

246. In what sense are my sensations private? — Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it.

This much is true: it makes sense to say about other people that they surmise (guess, suppose, suspect) I am in pain; but not to say it about myself. — Not Wittgenstein

That too is pretty convincing, even if you choose to dance around "know" a little. I wasn't even thinking about §246 when I said of my claim to be able to play the tuba, "I'm not guessing." **

There's a language-game that relates knowing and guessing, isn't there? It's the one he rejects, the one that pictures our sensations as secrets we know and others can only guess. When I say I'm in pain, I'm not guessing, and that makes it, as he notes, natural to say I know I'm in pain. (Note also that the defense of others knowing I'm in pain is just that we do in fact use the word "know" this way — that settles the question even before he gets to the stuff about learning of my pain from my behavior — but he doesn't consider that defense for "I know I'm in pain.")

I'm not rejecting Wittgenstein's entire analysis here, but I'm uncomfortable with the suggestion, often made, that Wittgenstein has demonstrated there is one and only one correct way to use the word "know": it belongs to the knowing-doubting-justifying game and no others, and if you try to use it any other way it's just nonsense. It's his own damn fault, but it doesn't seem like this should have been his legacy.


** I was in fact thinking of King of the Hill.
Hank: "Do you know where I can find 4 D batteries for my flashlight?"
Mega-Lo-Mart clerk: "Aisle 30, I think."
Hank: "This is aisle 30." [It's obviously the toy department.]
Mega-Lo-Mart clerk: "15? 3!"
Hank: "Stop guessing. Either you know or you don't know."

Because if an evolutionary theory is thought of that way, then it may end up applying to itself. — onomatomanic

Yes, I wasn't explicit about it, but I meant to imply that when I said

We're now very comfortable seeing evolutionary processes in language and culture and science itself. — Srap Tasmaner

I saw this as reinforcing your sense, if this is the right way to put it, that scientists might expect to see "in nature" just the sort of thing they go through themselves when theorizing about nature, but it might be the other way around. The belief that nature is "finished" suggests that you could write out a perfect equation that explains what goes on out there, and maybe already have. What do scientists think now? Certainly no one thinks science is done; no one thinks nature is done, as is, since we still have the heat death of the universe to look forward to, but maybe the "laws of nature", including those damned laws of thermodynamics, are done, and the clockwork is just more complicated than we thought. Lee Smolin thinks maybe not, but I'm not sure how seriously that's taken. I've now somehow switched around to suggesting that the universe is still kind of static and our science too. Maybe this is the real story, some continual swing back and forth between the two poles.

I think it's a good question, but so long as we're speaking very broadly, I'd be tempted to distinguish roughly between before and after Darwin. Newton's 'clockwork universe' is not dynamic in the way we now expect nature to be, with galaxies and even matter itself 'evolving', if that's the right way to put that.

We're now very comfortable seeing evolutionary processes in language and culture and science itself. It could be there's a general expectation now that an understanding of what something is must be directly connected to an understanding of how it came to be. But I'm not sure that's new at all; the ancients recognized that connection. And it's even possible to see change over time as predictable, 'empires rise and fall', that sort of thing, which has a static vibe to it.

But I still think you're right that there's something different about the modern view, and I still think it's probably Darwin. I just can't put my finger on it.

claims to knowledge can typically be checked by others and ourselves. You might claim to be able to play the tuba or how to speak Russian, and we could test your knowledge by asking you to demonstrate. But how can we similarly discover or learn whether or not I have a headache? How could my knowledge be tested in order to demonstrate to myself and to others that I really do (or don't) know whether I have a headache? — Luke

Alright, so imagine I claim I can play the tuba, but there's not one handy to *prove* it. (Have to come back to this.) Suppose someone else says, "No really, I've heard him play the tuba." I think it's reasonable to take that as a claim to *know* that I can play the tuba, because they have experience that put them in a position to know. At this point, you can choose to trust them, to take their word for it, or demand further evidence. But that's the same choice you faced with my initial claim that I know how to play the tuba, and the presumption that I'm in a position to know whether I can. I'm not guessing.

Suppose someone finds a tuba and I play a bit of a song. All we know now is that I can play what I played, and maybe that's it. (Kind of a "Slumdog Millionaire" situation.) How much do I have to play? How much knowledge do I have to demonstrate? At some point, I think it comes back to trust that I possess still more knowledge and capability than I've actually demonstrated.

I think verification gives you reason to trust, but a claim to knowledge is a claim that, on the matter at hand, what I say can be trusted, can be relied upon.

This is why at least most reports about my current condition or my mental states, past and present, can readily be treated as matters of knowledge. When Sam Spade tells Brigid O'Shaughnessy, "Maybe I love you and maybe you love me," she responds, "You know whether you love me or not, Sam."

It's not that people cannot be confused or uncertain about this sort of thing, of course not. It's not even that when they make a claim about their mental state, they must be right. It's that we by and large accept each other as authorities on our own mental states, because, as the saying goes, "If you don't know, who should I ask?" We are the only ones in the position to know a great many things about ourselves.

It isn't gibberish, but you'd still probably ask for clarification because it's such a weird question.

I think anytime people ask for clarification, they're trying to make an utterance useful. They're trying to find the missing context. — frank

Right. The standard Grice 101 examples are nearby: I ask if you want to stop here to eat and you say, looking at your phone, it's more than two hours to the next town.

That implies a yes, but it's not definitely a yes -- it's "cancellable", you might follow up with "I can wait if you want to" -- but taken literally it's a non sequitur. Grice's theory is that when a maxim (in this case, "Be relevant") is violated, we look for an entailment that will maintain the cooperative spirit of conversation, so you reason your way from a comment about geography back to a response to the question, or a suggestion about what to do, and so on. That's "conversational implicature" in a nutshell.

It gives you another way of approaching that sense we might have that many of the things a philosopher might find herself saying would be very peculiar, pointless, or somehow inappropriate, in everyday conversation. That this is true, is not the same as the sentences in question being nonsense or not being truth-apt.

Depends on how we're using the term meaningful. — Sam26

I meant it just in the sense of 'has a meaning', 'can be understood', and, for these cases of indicative sentences, 'can be assigned a truth-value'.

One reason for distinguishing meaning (sentence meaning) from use (speaker's meaning) can be seen somewhat clearly in Antony's example:

Maybe when you've made it aware to me that you have a headache, then, when I see you a little while later and you have an ice pack on your knee, and I point to your head and shrug, saying "Don't you have a headache?", you might look at me (like I'm an idiot) and say "I know I have a headache." -- but this is in the sense of "Duh, I know", as in the use (grammatical category) of: I am aware. — Antony Nickles

There are a couple things to note about this. One is that "Don't you have a headache?" is a yes-or-no question, but does not receive a yes-or-no response. If we take "I know I have a headache" as an affirmative response, is that to say that, in this case, the sentence "I know I have a headache" means "Yes" because that's the use of it in this language-game? (If I know I have a headache, then I have a headache, etc. There's an entailment there we can work out.) We might also say that the point being made by saying "I know I have a headache" is something like, "You're being an idiot. Obviously I have also injured my knee. The two are unrelated." Should we say that's the meaning of "I know I have a headache" here?

The alternative, mainly deriving from Grice, is to say that the literal meaning of the sentence has not changed; if we take "I know I have a headache" as "Yes" or as "Don't be an idiot", it's for other reasons that have to do with how conversation works. "I know I have a headache" still just means what it usually means, but you can mean "Yes" by saying it.

On such an approach, the trouble with sentences like "Here is one hand" or "I know that is a tree" is not that they are meaningless, in fact both can be simply true; they usually ought not be said because to do so would violate a norm of conversation (Grice's maxims). That's the gist.

And this sort of analysis requires a distinction:

The precept that one should be careful not to confuse meaning and use is perhaps on the way toward being as handy a philosophical vade-mecum as once was the precept that one should be careful to identify them. — Grice

This doesn't seem right — Sam26

No, it doesn't, and I'm not wedded to the "necessarily true" bit. I'm not sure how else to characterize sentences that we seem unable or unwilling or unmotivated to consider the contrary of. While writing the last post I began to suspect that it may be something entailed by such a claim that must be true.

I'm glad you flagged that --- I'll work on it tomorrow.

Can you sensibly say that you don’t know you have a headache? — Luke

Consider saying "2 + 2 = 5". Is that meaningless, is it utterly unclear what someone would mean if they were to say this, or is it just false? Or consider @Banno's example: "Paris is the capital of lemongrass." Is that meaningless or is it just false? (Lemongrass, not being a country, has no capital; a fortiori Paris is not that capital. )

Now for our example. It's supposed to be nonsensical to say "I don't know that I have a headache" and therefore nonsensical to say "I know I have a headache." What about other sentences nearby? Suppose someone said, "I don't know whether I have a headache." I would certainly find this a puzzling thing to say, and I'd be tempted respond, "How could you not know whether you have a headache? Surely, if you had a headache, you'd know it." To my ear, that's not only meaningful but true, and the negative I'm dismissing as if it were simply contradictory. I understand them to be saying they do not know something which, I believe, if it were the case, they would know it. "I don't know I have a headache" seems to entail, if not itself to be, a contradiction.

Again, it's not that there's nothing odd about a sentence like "I know I have a headache." The question is whether its defect is semantic. For instance, if that sentence can only be true, it's not perfectly clear it can be asserted, that saying it would count as a "claim" at all. Then what use can be made of such a sentence? Not altogether clear. (We haven't touched on one of the other uses of "I know ..." which I think of as 'concessive': "I know it's Saturday, and I know I said I wouldn't check my work email today, but I have to nail down a schedule for next week." That's not a claim to knowledge but admitting that you have it. And there are others. @Antony Nickles offered some possibilities too.)

The question I am focused on is whether, in denying that a sentence is useful in some circumstance, do we deny that it is meaningful? Do we deny that it could carry a truth-value?

If you agree that the statement is nonsense, — Luke

As I understand the usual take on LW, if a sentence has a use, if it's useful, if it's a valid move in a language-game, then it's meaningful, because that's what meaning is--- use in a language-game. If a sentence is not useful, then it's nonsense.

That's the view I'm questioning, the complete identification of use and meaning.

So I don't assume the sentences in question are nonsense, even if they are odd or pointless or otherwise lacking an obvious usefulness. I'm suggesting such a sentence can still be meaningful and even true.

Right. If you can sensibly say one, you ought to be able sensibly to say the other. Negation also comes up here: if you can sensibly say you know you have a headache, you ought to be able sensibly to say that you don't know you have a headache.

One alternative might be to say that "I know I have a headache" is necessarily true, and that the apparent failure of the negations or of the 'doubt' version, regardless of context, show that. The peculiarity of saying "I know I have a headache" would not be, then, due to a semantic catastrophe (that it's nonsense) but something else.

That it is an odd thing to say, a thing perhaps one rarely has any reason to say, is not in question; whether the reasons not to say it are semantic, is the issue.

It's not like Wittgenstein had nothing to say about meaning, and he's widely read as endorsing a kind of functionalism: the meaning of a word, perhaps as well the meaning of a sentence, simply is the use one makes of it, or can make of it, as a move in a language-game.

Whether that paragraph represents Wittgenstein well, I'll pass on for now.

The question I am trying to raise is whether that view, LW's or not, is defensible.

If no one in this thread holds that view, I won't get anywhere unless someone plays devil's advocate, but I would be surprised, as most of the Wittgensteinian folks around here are only too happy to talk about 'moves in a language-game' and so forth. Maybe @Luke will take me up on it.

The method Witt uses in imagining a context for an expression is to show that the sentence is meaningful, — Antony Nickles

Was it meaningless when originally said here a few pages back?

Suppose I claim to know I have five dollars, but refuse to open my wallet in justification. It would be quite reasonable for you to doubt my claim. — Banno

Looking in your wallet is how we would verify that you have $5; how would we verify that you knew that, that you weren't just guessing?

"I know I have and itch" doesn't achieve the status of being eligible for a truth value, to use your somewhat constipated term, becasue it is not grammatically a statement. It's not like "Paris is the capital of France"; Nor "Paris is the capital of Germany"; but more like "Paris is the capital of lemongrass". — Banno

If it's like the last one, then is it meaningless?

By the way, are you allowing that it can be true or false that I know Paris is the capital of France? How about, "I know I left my keys right here"? Or "I know I was thinking about something important a minute ago, but now I can't remember what it was"?

Again, AN isn't there to point blame at people, just recognize what is going on and to prevent the harms onto a future person. — schopenhauer1

Except it is a specific claim that you should not have children, isn't it? That to do so would be wrong, would be blameworthy. Benatar does not just say, "If and only if you have children, they will be harmed," which is surely true, but also, "Therefore you should not have children."

I think there's some room for debate there, but let's say you're right about all of that. What I'm more interested in at the moment is this sort of claim:

You can't correctly be said to know you have an itch. — Banno

Does that mean it's incorrect to say I know I have a headache? "Incorrect" how? In the sense that it's false? Or does "I know I have a headache", despite appearances, have no truth-value?

There are all sorts of sentences that are still meaningful despite lacking a truth-value, but this isn't a question or a command or a recommendation, or any of those cases; it's a simple indicative sentence. For sentences like that, being meaningful and being truth-apt go hand-in-hand. So do we conclude that "I know I have a headache" is meaningless, or that it is some sort of exception?

The question is exactly this: is the use of a sentence in a language-game its meaning? (Whether this is what Wittgenstein claims, I'd leave aside for the moment.) If you show, to your satisfaction, that a given sentence is not a 'valid move in a language-game' --- and let's say "You don't demonstrate to your self that you have a pain - you just have a pain" does that --- then did you thereby show that the sentence is meaningless? Or that it lacks a truth-value? Or both?

That's roughly my instinct, that theology is a motor spinning alright but not hooked up to a drivetrain; I just don't really trust that instinct. Think for example of how religious belief and the attendant language can be woven into the morality of believers, in their choices, in how they teach their children. It feels arbitrary to deny there is a practice here in which saying this rather than that matters. Maybe the mistake I'm worried about is lumping together all religious speech; there are lots of different sorts of things one might say, that could count as religious, and some of them connect rather clearly to practice and some quite a bit less clearly.

And if we decide, no, there's no language-game here, does that render religious speech nonsense? If a sentence like 'Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead' is nonsense, then presumably it's not just, for instance, false. I can't quite convince myself that sentence doesn't have, and cannot have, a truth-value. It's part of a story, yes, and we're generally not interested in the truth-value of sentences in stories; we're in somewhat different territory when the story is about a real person in a real place. I told someone just today the anecdote about Kurt Gödel's Selective Service form, but then mentioned that I don't know if that story's true. Anyway, I don't find that sequence, [no practice] >> [no language-game] >> [no meaning] >> [no truth-value] entirely convincing.

That sounds reasonable, but leaves me wondering why you might think religions and theologies, which @Janus had asked about, aren't language-games. What would 'disqualify' them?

The objection here is not that you do not have a pain - that, for you, is certain. It's that "I know I am in pain" is like "I know I have an iPhone". — Banno

Or 'I remembered my own name again,' when filling out a form.

Grant that it is pointless to say, 'i know I have a headache'; is there also something wrong with saying that? Is it, as some suggest, having read LW, a misuse of the word 'know'?

I'll just say again that, it seems to me unlikely that Wittgenstein had the same understanding of "language-game" as someone inclined to ask, 'Is such-and-such a language game?' or 'Is such-and-such really a language-game?' or 'Is such-and-such a proper or correct language-game?' since he himself never seems to ask such questions. Rather than think such obvious questions didn't occur to him, I'm inclined now to think maybe "language-game" is not an ontological category at all, but a sort of analysis.

Maybe. But then it's still odd that he didn't foresee what in some ways is a very natural and apparently widespread misreading, and preemptively warn against it, so I don't know that my idea isn't in the same boat.

common sense as a flattening out of individual experience in which everyone is on the same page because the common understanding is designed to be vague , ambiguous and general enough to foster this sense of shared experience. — Joshs

Oof. I hope we can aim a little higher than that.

Maybe, for comparison, something more like this:

Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. — Thoreau

You can speak plainly and simply without thereby simplifying what you have to say or being insincere, without changing what you have to say into 'what everyone says'. To do so is to honor your own experience, your own thought, and to honor your audience. I hope.

Speaking in such a way that an audience can grasp your intended meaning sounds to me like an exercise that is useful in only the most superficial sort of circumstance — Joshs

It's a start. There's little point in speaking Russian to me, for instance. And you need to be mindful of what your audience is likely to know and not know. The basics.

This isn’t a matter of not being able to interpret single utterances, but of not fathoming the deeper motivational justification for the actions of others. Single utterances are just the tip of an enormous iceberg — Joshs

Absolutely. I'm not talking just about understanding the meaning of what you say (as above--- I, for instance, don't grok Russian) but also what you mean by saying it. Beyond that there are of course bigger questions, like are you seeking truth or trolling? And bigger. If 'bigger' is the right way to put that.

Put differently, truly common sense is often the product of an enormous effortful constructive achievement. — Joshs

I wouldn't disagree, but it's not what people usually mean by 'common sense'. The usual sense is what allows people to understand statements like @Daemon's: "If the baby doesn't thrive on raw milk, try boiling it."

And I stand by my 'court of appeal' thing, I think: when someone says, "That doesn't follow" or something similar, I think something like 'common sense', as it's usually understood, is the ultimate backstop. If you can't make the steps of your point in plain language relying only on the usual canons of informal rationality, there's nothing else to appeal to. (I'm thinking of this a little in terms of the debates about the 'expressive power' of programming languages, if that helps.)

I think I would include in 'common sense' the precept that an utterance ought to be understood as it was intended and not some other way. On the other hand, you have to speak in such a way that your audience can grasp your intended meaning. (Plus all the other layers Grice describes.)

Did you have something different in mind? Have I failed to grasp the intended meaning of your post?

let the thing tell us how to grasp it with its ordinary criteria — Antony Nickles

The word "its" there is odd, though, isn't it? Why isn't it, "our ordinary criteria"?

We cling to the aspiration for the ideal — Antony Nickles

I'm not convinced by this "clinging" image, or by pointing the finger at our "desire" for certainty, as if the trouble is some psychological quirk. I think language is inherently idealizing, and when we talk about it, we're idealizing the idealizing already there, but--- language is also strangely open-ended, and in coming up with new uses (@StreetlightX, @Joshs) we are not only idealizing anew but undermining older idealizations.

What Wittgenstein is able to show, when he describes the language-game in which an Important Word has its 'original home' (was that the phrase?), is not a use devoid of idealization, but how idealization works, and how it can be used to do work. For a novel use to be useful, we need to understand how older usages manage to be successful, and that's what language-games are supposed to make apparent.

I think so, yes. If there's uncertainty or confusion, explanations will have to be made, and those will have to come to ground somewhere. There is, it seems to me, no higher 'court of appeal' available than common sense.

How about "trolling"? — Michael Zwingli

Wikipedia is your friend:

In internet slang, a troll is a person who posts inflammatory, insincere, digressive,[1] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog), with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses,[2] or manipulating others' perception. — Wiki

Yes.

Brutish moderation is worse than trolling. — Varde

Either can destroy a community we intend to preserve.

But it can still get you banned.

It doesn't seem to be easily resolvable. — Sam26

But is it a problem with Wittgenstein or with this way of reading him?

In the case of not having kids, we know that we benefitted no one. We have prevented harm from no one. — khaled

Wearing my 'moral sentiments' hat, I would add that doing good for another or preventing harm to them gives rise to a feeling that you have done good. If a stack of boxes is about to fall over on someone and you help them shore those boxes up, they feel relief and gratitude toward you for your help; I think Adam Smith would say you imaginatively share in their feelings and that's why you feel that your action was positive and moral.

I think, in general, this sort of thing reinforces the reciprocity of our moral duties and expectations. We help them in part because they would have helped us, or because they should even if they're not the sort of person who would. You also set an example by your behavior, and demonstrate what virtuous behavior is.

In the case of children, there are long-standing customs of filial piety; it's one of the central virtues and duties of Confucianism, and the ancient Hebrews even claimed it as a commandment from God. It is the complement of the duty of parents to care for their children, and the virtue of being a good parent.

Antinatalism cannot, by definition, include this sort of reciprocity. Your duty is to no one; the good you do is for no one. They cannot learn from your example to become more virtuous.

what is "flaming" — Michael Zwingli

Flaming is insulting someone in an online discussion, and is much older than social media. As practiced here, I consider it an attempt at bullying rather than arguing and I have a very low tolerance for it. Call your opponent's position 'stupid' all you want; call them 'stupid' and your post may very well be deleted.

A 'sockpuppet' is an account you pretend is not yours. In this case, as none of us are public figures, that would mean a secondary account. If I created an account to constantly chime in agreeing with Srap, that would be a sockpuppet, or if I were banned and returned under a new name every five minutes or so.