The OP said that by "everything" he meant the universe. — Mongrel

Yeah, except he started by asking about "potential entities that could and could not happen, exist in our world or not exist, and are abstract, fictitious, or imaginary," so "everything."

"Everything can be talked about."
— Srap Tasmaner
Interesting. So language and the world are co-extensive? — Banno

"No triangle has four sides."

Does "everything" include potential entities that could and could not happen, exist in our world or not exist, and are abstract, fictitious, or imaginary?
Do we include "everything" in addition to material things, non-material things, spiritual things, etc.? — wax1232

First off, the question has a slightly peculiar ring to our ears. wax1232 didn't ask "What is there?" although that's how many readers took his question, not entirely without reason. (Even Quine said the answer to "What is there?" is "Everything!" but then spent decades telling us what was not included in "everything.")

So in what circumstances would you ask "What does 'everything' include?" rather than "What is there?"

"Everything" is a quantifier. As Willow pointed out, it's most often most useful to use it in a restricted sense, with some domain specified or at least implied by context. It is always so used in mathematics for instance.

Philosophy, however, is not mathematics, and we seem to retain a use for absolute (unrestricted) quantifiers. For one thing, if "what there is" is precisely what is at issue, it can be tricky to use a restricted quantifier without begging the question.

I suspect the OP was presented, or thought up on his own, one of those maddening arguments that makes use of absolute quantifiers, and wants to figure out if it really makes sense. (I'm thinking of arguments that include premises like "Everything has a cause," "Everything must come from something," that sort of thing.)

This is not foolish. The question of how to interpret absolute quantifiers is quite serious.

Is there actually any use for unrestricted quantifiers? I think I can give you at least one, probably one of the first philosophers learn: "We can talk about anything." (Or if you prefer, "Everything can be talked about.") We learn this early, because we learn to tell people that just because you can talk about something, that doesn't mean it's real. (This has considerable appeal to undergraduates and positivists.) I would say that here we have an absolute, unrestricted quantifier, that we need it to make such a statement at all, and that it works just fine. (Hence my earlier answer to the OP of "yes.")

Are they chanting "Bann-o! Bann-o! Bann-o!" in that clip? That can't be right.

Sorry, my English is bad. — wax1232

Your English is just fine, btw. (Your command of my language is certainly better than my command of whatever your native language is.)

I'm curious to know what you think of the answers you've gotten so far.

What were you thinking about that led you to ask the question?

I didn't say it would be fun for you.

this ought to be fun

Yes.

Not only not trying to build a theory, but believed building a theory was wrong-headed and doomed to failure. (We're talking about "later" here.) There's some space left for therapeutic philosophy, but it makes you wonder what his attitude toward science must be, and I don't know much about that.

To clarify: I think the answer to your original question is actually "no": LW's talk of language-games is not part of a language-game. In fact, I don't think he attached any particular importance to the really general remarks people try to cobble into a theory (language-games, forms of life, etc.). Those are just hints, analogies, pictures, all obiter dicta. The important bit -- to him -- is showing case-by-case what philosophers have ignored, overlooked, misused, perverted, misunderstood about the words they use.

The funny thing is, I can't offhand remember LW making any comments that suggest he thought of philosophizing itself as a language-game. Anybody think of one?

We get the opposite here & there-- there's the bit about how philosophers take words out of the language-game where they have their usual home, I think there's one about an engine spinning without being connected to anything, the bit about language on holiday. When he talks of philosophy and language-games in the same breath it's usually to suggest philosophers have been breaking the rules.

People do somehow come away with the impression that he says all language use is part of some language-game, but does he?

Early to late, there's that concern with being misled by the surface forms of language, and thus philosophers (who else?) can end up doing something we might as well call "misusing" language. It seems like a whole different deal from language-games. Almost a perversion of the idea of a language-game.

(I'll say this too: I think at some point he stopped being puzzled by how language works--of course it works!--and saw the real puzzle as how it could possibly go wrong. I'm not sure he really figures that out...I could be way off though.)

I'm probably forgetting something--maybe someone else can chime in.

Truth is one of the rules of some of the games. It's the main rule of "Confession", and an important rule of "Philosophy", "History", and even "Biography". It's not a rule of "Story-telling" or "Poetry". Thus one does not ask if the ring of power was really destroyed in Mt Doom, or in what way my love is like a red red rose.

My understanding is that to talk of different language games is simply to say that we do different things with words, and the rules vary according to what we are doing. — unenlightened

I don't think it should be quite this easy. Your second paragraph is obviously true, but I don't think it buys us what you say in the first paragraph. Easy to imagine a rule that says you must "tell the truth," but can there even be a rule that what you say must be true? I think you still need an account of truth, or an argument for why you don't need one, and I don't think the bare concept of "language-games" gets you there without more work.

I think the consensus of the folks I've talked to in this thread is that the concept of language games is not as distinct from propositional meaning as I had thought it was. In fact, I can't really tell the difference. The examples given in this thread to try to point to the meaning of "language games" actually involved all the conceptual apparatus involved in deriving a proposition. — Mongrel

One simplistic approach is to take the concept of language-games as the natural successor to Frege's context principle. If that sounds like the sort of thing that would interest you, then you should read the Investigations someday when you've got the time.

I do believe language is sometimes rule-based and game-like, but I just don't see that becoming a general rule. — Mongrel

We want truth to show up here somewhere, right?