Improper meaning would not be the absence of meaning but a meaning that was not what was meant — Fooloso4

I still think it's an improper formulation. Meaning is in no way predicated on intention in Witty, and this includes when it doesn't conform to intention.

Wittgenstein does not claim that explanation must be mostly replaced with descriptions. He does not say that philosophy discovers some new facts, just not that many. — Isaac

Where did I say any of that?

Where did I say any of that? — Sam26

I didn't claim you did. I said, your exposition is littered with caveats which are not present in the text. 109 says we must do away with all explanations. 110 declares our problems to be the illusion that language is unique, one-to-one related to the structure of the world. 111 likens the depth of philosophy to the problems arising from our misinterpretations of our forms of language. He doesn't hold back.

And yet you have interpreted them as "some or much of the time) a chimera", "not all, but much of what passes as philosophical problems", "dissolves some of the problems".

You've introduced a limitation to the scope which is not there in the text. I just wondered why is all.

Meaning is in no way predicated on intention in Witty, and this includes when it doesn't conform to intention. — StreetlightX

Meaning is not predicated on any one thing, but in some cases it is predicated in part on intention.

In a previous post you said:

There either 'is' meaning or there is not: either what is said has some significance that can be cottoned on to, or there is not. 'Improper meaning' is not a thing. — StreetlightX

Who or what determines the meaning? What is said may mean different things to difference people. If I am the speaker and you take what I said in the wrong way then what you thought what I said meant was an improper meaning, it was not without meaning.

If you are given safety instructions on how to exit the plane and you thought the instructions meant pull in the window rather than push out the window, then that was not the proper meaning, which means, that was not what you were supposed to do.

the overall picture. — Sam26

In this context, 'picture' makes me think Escher. He has several pictures that point out in various ways how a picture can try, but always eventually fails, to be three-dimensional.

Drawing Hands is a lithograph by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher first printed in January 1948. It depicts a sheet of paper out of which, from wrists that remain flat on the page, two hands rise, facing each other and in the paradoxical act of drawing one another into existence.

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

Here we are, trying to get the perspective just right in our verbal picture of how language functions in the world, but always failing to escape the flatland of language and enter the world. And the effort to make language do what it cannot do produces paradoxes that are the equivalent of impossible objects; elements that make sense as 3d objects put together in a way that makes no sense as a 3d object.

If I am the speaker and you take what I said in the wrong way then what you thought what I said meant was an improper meaning, it was not without meaning. — Fooloso4

But this directly contradicts the private language argument. You can't claim that the thing you intended is what the word 'means' else words have meanings inside individual minds and so become impossible to use consistently in a community.

You can't claim that the thing you intended is what the word 'means' else words have meanings inside individual minds — Isaac

But that is not what I claim. It is not a question of mind or the problem of a private language. When I say something I mean something by what I say. Don't you?

When I say something I mean something by what I say. Don't you? — Fooloso4

I could do (depending on how you're using 'mean'), but that would not, cannot, be the 'proper' meaning. The meaning of a word is conferred by its use in the language game. If I say" apple" but mean the orange coloured citrus fruit, unless we are paying some game, the word I have said means the shiny fruit of the Malus sylvestris tree, what I meant by it has no bearing on the matter. It cannot do because otherwise language, as a means of communication, would cease to function.

If you are given safety instructions on how to exit the plane and you thought the instructions meant pull in the window rather than push out the window, then that was not the proper meaning, which means, that was not what you were supposed to do. — Fooloso4

In this second example the failure to escape the plane is irrelevant to the meaning of the instructions. If the flight attendant had been consistently saying "pull", then the meaning of the word "pull" would remain completely unaffected by even the most fervent desire that you push. So if, on the other hand, the flight attendant had been saying "push" (and you interpreted it as "pull") how has her intention to help you escape the plane suddenly become foundational to the word's meaning when it wasn't before.

If I say" apple" but mean the orange coloured citrus fruit — Isaac

Yes, as Alice was told: say what you mean or mean what you say. If you do not use words as they are commonly used that means you will have a hard time conveying your meaning. It does not mean that words mean whatever you intent them to.

In this second example the failure to escape the plane is irrelevant to the meaning of the instructions. If the flight attendant had been consistently saying "pull", then the meaning of the word "pull" would remain completely unaffected by even the most fervent desire that you push. — Isaac

Correct usage and correct understanding of that usage is not here a theoretical matter. But the example is not about the flight attendant's intention but about what those instructions mean to a passenger. He either gets the meaning right or wrong. The meaning is determined by whether he is to push or pull, greatly increasing his chances of escaping or not.

When I say something I mean something by what I say. Don't you?
— Fooloso4

I could do (depending on how you're using 'mean'), but that would not, cannot, be the 'proper' meaning. The meaning of a word is conferred by its use in the language game. If I say" apple" but mean the orange coloured citrus fruit, unless we are paying some game, the word I have said means the shiny fruit of the Malus sylvestris tree, what I meant by it has no bearing on the matter. It cannot do because otherwise language, as a means of communication, would cease to function. — Isaac

If it ain't shared, it ain't meaning. If I say 'apple' but mean android, I've made a mistake. If you mistake my intention , then your mistake is caused by my mistake, and meaning is lost. If you understand my intention despite my mistake, then meaning is not lost and you get to call me Mrs Malaprop.

Dear Mrs Malaprop,

I am writing to you to let you know that I like your example of wrong usage and right meaning.

You both seem to be arguing against the exact opposite of what I said. Have I missed a 'not' out somewhere, or is my writing that unclear?

Perhaps I have not understood your meaning properly. Perhaps it was not what you intended to say.

Well I'm not arguing at all, certainly not against anything. If we agree, and express ourselves differently, then the flexibility of language is demonstrated. I am trying to indicate, in a rather loose way, that what happens when we use language is bigger than language. I pile up some keystrokes, and someone gets upset. Wow!

Well said.

What is at issue is your claim:

Therefore, rules or grammar determine proper and improper meaning. — Fooloso4

I wasn't aware this was at issue, given that it was an inference I made from your statements:

The meaning of a word is found in its use. Rules or grammar determine proper and improper use. — Fooloso4

You initially stated that rules determine proper and improper use, not me.

Your inference is not correct. The rules for use is not the same as the actual use. There will other opportunities to look at what W. says about the rules. I think I will leave it here for now.

but in some cases it is predicated in part on intention. — Fooloso4

Not for Witty, it isn't.

If I am the speaker and you take what I said in the wrong way then what you thought what I said meant was an improper meaning, it was not without meaning. — Fooloso4

Maybe so - but this has nothing to do with the PI. 'Improper meaning' is still an awful locution. One mistakes what is meant, or gets a meaning wrong by doing contrarywise to what is expected: but 'meaning' cannot be qualified as 'proper' or 'improper'. The mistake is not - never is - with 'meaning'.

If you are given safety instructions on how to exit the plane and you thought the instructions meant pull in the window rather than push out the window, then that was not the proper meaning, which means, that was not what you were supposed to do. — Fooloso4

Exactly as Issac said: that you have mistaken the meaning of 'pull' says everything about your inability to understand a meaning, and nothing about meaning, or its 'im/properness'.

In any case, nowhere in the PI is meaning qualified as 'proper' or 'improper'.

but in some cases it is predicated in part on intention.
— Fooloso4

Not for Witty, it isn't. — StreetlightX

How would you explain 125:

It throws light on our concept of meaning something. For in those cases things turn out otherwise than we had meant, foreseen. That is just what we say when, for example, a contradiction appears: "I didn't mean it like that." — PI

without intention? How do we make sense of not meaning it like that if there is no intended meaning?

The mistake is not - never is - with 'meaning'. — StreetlightX

When I do not understand you then what is the mistake with?

.. your inability to understand a meaning, and nothing about meaning — StreetlightX

Not understanding a meaning has nothing to do with meaning? I do not understand what you mean.

When I do not understand you then what is the mistake with? — Fooloso4

A mistake in and of comprehension. An inbility to understand something has to do with one's understanding - education, brain capacity - not 'meaning'. One comprehends the meaning mistakenly; not: one comprehends the 'improper meaning'. Mistake qualifies comprehension, not meaning. The fault is with 'us', not meaning. We misunderstand, not 'mismean'. All so many ways of saying the same thing.

Meaning is never - cannot be because a category mistake - improper.

We'll get to 125 soon enough.

Your inference is not correct. — Fooloso4

I would appreciate if you could explain how rules can determine use but not meaning. I don't recall Wittgenstein discussing this later in the text.

§110-§115

I don't like these sections at all, and find them more ranty than substantial. The thematics we've come across before in more interesting contexts rear their head again although in far more a flaky manner: illusions of depth, the mistake of uniqueness, false appearances of essence, the way in which we are 'impressed' by these illusions, etc. One interesting connection to be made - I think these remarks actually shed light on one of the more enigmatic passages earlier in the PI, namely, §38:

"Naming seems to be a strange connection of a word with an object. - And such a strange connection really obtains, particularly when a philosopher tries to fathom the relation between name and what is named by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name, or even the word “this”, innumerable times. For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. And then we may indeed imagine naming to be some remarkable mental act, as it were the baptism of an object. And we can also say the word “this” to the object, as it were address the object as “this” a a strange use of this word, which perhaps occurs only when philosophizing."

It was hard - for me anyway - to get a clear sense of these comments at the time, but the sections here (§110-§115 and its neighbours) make certain things about it clear, I think. Specifically, the 'strange connection' and 'repetitive staring' has to do with the (illusion) of uniqueness, first mentioned in §93, in contrast to the (reality) of diversity, or what Witty thematizes under the rubric of 'family resemblances'. The 'repetition' here has to do, I think, with trying and (importantly) failing to 'see' the (apparently hidden) 'essence' of language. It's a kind of repetition compulsion, in the Freudian sense of repeating failure in order to try and 'work through' it:

§113: “But this is how it is ---- ” I say to myself over and over again
§114: "That is the kind of proposition one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing nature over and over again..."
§115: "language seemed only to repeat it to us inexorably."

So the key conceptual link - as I understand it - is that between uniqueness (or 'remarkableness') and repetition, and how the illusion of the former gives rise to the fixation of the later. It might be said that 'philosophy', for Witty, just is a pathological repetition compulsion in the psychoanalytic sense. Another important connection that begins to be linked here is that between uniqueness and 'generality': although Witty has invoked (critically) the notion of generality before (esp. the 'general form of the proposition' - cf. §65, §74, §104). Also interesting - and significant - that Witty primarily employs perceptual and specifically visual metaphors (something @fdrake already pointed out):

§113: "If only I could fix my gaze absolutely sharply on this fact and get it into focus".
§115: "A picture held us captive". ; Note the connection with earlier sections:
§90: "We feel as if we had to see right into phenomena"

Can't yet expound on why this insistence of visuality and pictures is important, other than to simply make note of it at this point.

How would you explain 125:

It throws light on our concept of meaning something. For in those cases things turn out otherwise than we had meant, foreseen. That is just what we say when, for example, a contradiction appears: "I didn't mean it like that." — PI


without intention? How do we make sense of not meaning it like that if there is no intended meaning? — Fooloso4

I realise we're not there yet, but I think it might be useful to look at 125 to clear this up a bit. You seem to be reading 125 as saying that a person's intention has some bearing on the 'proper' meaning of a word, that "I didn't mean it like that" indicates to us that the meaning of 'to mean' is related to intent.

But this is not what Wittgenstein is saying at 125. This aphorism is central to the section applying his thought to the practice of philosophy, he is no longer describing language. He is talking about the effect of laying down a set of rules (of our own devising) and then, when those rules do not produce the result we expect, we claim "I didn't mean it like that". But the next sentence says that the philosophical problem is the civil status of this contradiction. By this he means that it is not sufficient for one person to have their "this is the way it is..." and call any discrepancy a philosophical problem.

So the reference to a personal form of "that's not what I meant" at 125 is not intended to give authority to intention, but to highlight how the discrepancies therein are often (but erroneously) seen as philosophical problems.

§116

So, this is a fun one if only because I think it's one of the most misunderstood - and widely quoted - bits of the PI. It also helps to bring to a head much of what has been discussed so far.

Everything about §116 turns on how to understand the phrase 'everyday use' and (paraphrased) 'home language'. Here's what I think the common - and disastrously bad - mistake of reading this is: that we need to 'return' words to how they are used in actual, real life communities of speakers. One might call this the anthropological reading. This reading of §116 makes it as though we simply need to conduct a poll among speakers, ask them something like 'do you use the word X in this way, in your everyday life?', and then approve or disapprove of a use of a word based on the answer to this imagined poll.

This reading is awful. It disregards everything that has preceded this section, which makes every effort to distinguish between facts and logic, empiricism and ideality, while explicitly making clear that the investigations within bear upon the latter of each pair (logic, ideality). Explicitly:

§89: "[our investigations] shouldn’t concern itself whether things actually happen in this or that way... as if to this end we had to hunt out new facts; it is, rather, essential to our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it".
§81: "Logic does not treat of language - or of thought - in the sense in which natural science treats of a natural phenomenon".
§109: "Our considerations must not be scientific ones."
§109: "The problems are solved, not by coming up with new discoveries, but by assembling what we have long been familiar with".

The idea that to 'bring words back ... to their everyday use' means 'bringing them back to how they are in fact used by empirical communities of speakers' (as might be discovered) by conducting a poll contravenes all of the above. Witty's investigation is not an anthropology of language which seeks to return words back to their anthropological use, in contrast to their 'metaphysical use'. The sense of 'everyday' that Witty employs is not the same as '(actually) used daily'.

--

So - If not this, then what? What is an 'everyday use' if not an empirical use of language in an anthropological setting? Well, look first to its contrast: the 'ideal' or 'metaphysical' use that Witty has just spent the last 100 pages detailing and arguing against: the key to this 'metaphysical' use of language has to do with its normative content: the sense of how language 'ought' (§39), 'should', 'must' (§66, 97, 98, 101) or 'has to' (§112) be - to do with requiring (§107) something of language, and striving (§98) after that ideal, towards which language must 'aim at' (§91).

The 'metaphysical use of language' imagines that there is an essence/ideal of language which the actual use of language must/ought/should conform to. By contrast, the everyday use of language is any use of language which does not have this requirement. That's it. In this sense, the 'everyday use of language' is primarily defined negatively: a use of language which does not make it strive after an ideal. It is what we might call a subtractive view of language: language minus something, not language plus something (cf. the later comments on Witty's 'ground clearing' - §118).

All of which is to say, once again, that the 'everyday use' of language has nothing to do with an empirical use of language. This is the significance of the sharp distinction drawn between 'understanding' and 'fact' that was previously stressed (§89: "We do not seek to learn anything new by it [our investigations]. We want to understand something that is already in plain view.")

That should be plenty to chew on.

A mistake in and of comprehension. An inbility to understand something has to do with one's understanding - education, brain capacity - not 'meaning'. — StreetlightX

What is not comprehended or understand is the meaning.

One comprehends the meaning mistakenly; not: one comprehends the 'improper meaning'. — StreetlightX

I would say that one does not comprehend the meaning mistakenly, I would say one does not comprehend the meaning. It does not mean what she thought it did. One has attributed to it the wrong or improper meaning.

Mistake qualifies comprehension, not meaning. — StreetlightX

Comprehension of what if not the meaning?

The fault is with 'us', not meaning. — StreetlightX

Meaning is not something that exists independent of us. If something means something it means something to us. Without 'us' there is no meaning.

Eh, i don't think either of us are going to particularly budge on this. I'll settle for noting that the idea of 'improper meaning' simply appears nowhere on any page of the PI.

Meaning is not something that exists independent of us. If something means something it means something to us. Without 'us' there is no meaning. — Fooloso4

Apologies for hijacking your response to someone else, but this point exactly explains what I tried (and clearly failed) to express in my previous comment to you. The meaning of a word cannot exist independently of us, the community of language users. 'Us' being the key word, not me, or you, not the air stewardess or the passenger, but some collective of us.

Intention within a language game, however, is an individual thing, not a collective. The intention of the builder might be to obtain a slab, the intention of the builder's mate might be to pass up the correct object. The intention of the community of language users in that game is to build a wall.

I realise metaphors are a great risk, and this one probably more so than most, but... Imagine language were not the long drawn out evolving and cybernetic system it is, and we had to somehow try to replicate the evolution of a word's meaning (for a particular game) in a single meeting of language users. The way I imagine intent would play its role would be that everyone wrote down their meaning on a piece of paper, chucked it in the middle, and the most popular few were read out and a consensus arrived on.

So the intention of the air stewardesses in using the word "pull" gets to play a part in the development of what the word 'means', but it doesn't get an executive role.

I don't see why the anthropological reading cannot also be the subtractive reading. I consider it strange that Wittgenstein would have some specialised technical meaning for the phrase "everyday use". This everyday use could very well have the meaning of bringing words back to how they are in fact used by empirical communities of speakers, but we could more easily consult a dictionary rather than conduct a poll. That's the point about the philosopher's quest for the essences of (what turns out to be) merely the use of particular words: they cannot simply accept a dictionary definition, i.e. the everyday use, but are compelled to search for some ideal meaning. I find §116 to be closely related to §97: "if the words “language”, “experience”, “world” have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words “table”, “lamp”, “door”."

The anthropological reading trivializes everything Witty has to say. It's worse than useless, and ignores the entire development of the book up to this point.

It would also be utterly, hilariously, falsifiable - every half-wit knows that there are plenty of words that mean things that are not (yet?) in dictionaries; most idiots can even make up words with meanings that make perfect sense that have never been heard before. If the PI meant even less than that, it's only value would be as the ash at the bottom of a fire.

Okay. Don't worry, I won't bother trying to bring back the phrase "everyday use" to its everyday use.