Are they indoctrinated (in some negative sense) to an individual through repetition and training? Would this be the primary function of 'schools' and 'education'? — Posty McPostface

Is teaching my daughter how to use a hammer indoctrinating her?

I have the feeling there is a sub-text game here. None the less...

We are designed to pick up the rules of language. It starts very early on, and we just learn the rules. Are we talking about how we learn language? Or are we talking about screwy games some people play with language?

Playing word games (of the good sort and the deviously bad sort) is a human thing, and little children learn how to do both, along with simultaneously learning Polish, Mandarin Chinese, and Old English -- if they happen to live in a strange time zone. We all prefer that people just say what they mean and mean what they say. Unless, of course, what they mean and say is really uncomplimentary and altogether too clearly expressed. Save us from crystal clear criticism.

So, Monsieur Posty McPostface, just what language game are you playing here? Are you trying to achieve some devious end by asking unpleasant questions under the cover of Herr Wittgenstein, about whom I know next to nothing?

a strange time zone — Bitter Crank

Saw what you did there.

I don't know, some people get the rules on their own and some don't and need extra guidance. Obviously, we won't be reinventing the wheel all by ourselves because that would be inefficient. But, for sake of performative utility, 'how?'

I have the feeling there is a sub-text game here. — Bitter Crank

Oh, you should know me by now, I talk without inhibition and try without facetiousness. OK, I am whimsical, but, that's about as bad as I get, a little wallowing here and there, but that's about it...

Anyway,

We are designed to pick up the rules of language. It starts very early on, and we just learn the rules. Are we talking about how we learn language? Or are we talking about screwy games some people play with language? — Bitter Crank

About how misunderstanding arises, would be a good way of putting it?

Playing word games (of the good sort and the deviously bad sort) is a human thing, and little children learn how to do both, along with simultaneously learning Polish, Mandarin Chinese, and Old English -- if they happen to live in a strange time zone. We all prefer that people just say what they mean and mean what they say. Unless, of course, what they mean and say is really uncomplimentary and altogether too clearly expressed. Save us from crystal clear criticism. — Bitter Crank

One such language game that impressed me and continues to impress me is what Rumsfeld said about there being known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. After reading it three times it sounds like gibberish; but, yeah the guy was smart, I guess is how you can put it.

So, Monsieur Posty McPostface, just what language game are you playing here? Are you trying to achieve some devious end by asking unpleasant questions under the cover of Herr Wittgenstein, about whom I know next to nothing? — Bitter Crank

Oh, take the topic and do what you want with it, we are playing language games after all!

About how misunderstanding arises, would be a good way of putting it? — Posty McPostface

No, because understanding about how misunderstanding arises just doesn't arise quick enough or at all, usually.

a little wallowing here and there — Posty McPostface

I believe you asserted that "wallowing is what you do best". For an extra 50 points, name the popular song from the 1960s where "wallow in the mire" appears. Hint:

Try to set the night on fire
The time to hesitate is through...

And which performers did the best job on it? (It's a matter of taste, so no bonus points for that)

known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns — Posty McPostface

Yes, he was right about that. The unknown unknowns particularly. Fortunately, maybe, we don't know too much about the unknown unknowns. Probably pretty bad. Like, there's an alien fleet that will attack earth (at their convenience) with microbes that will slowly turn us into green slime which the aliens will then ingest. Do we really want to know all about it ahead of time?

In the mean time, everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.

Obviously, we won't be reinventing the wheel all by ourselves because that would be inefficient. — Posty McPostface

So, how big was the research and development team that invented the wheel first? How do you know it wasn't an early Edison who shrieked "eureka" and rode off into the sun set on his new chariot?

Interesting question.

I think it's pretty simple although I'm not an expert. The rules of language are linear. We have a beginning (the subject) and we act (verb) on something (the object). It's a simple linear sequence and I think (not a language expert) all languages can be reduced to this basic chain of linguistic elements.

I like poetry though...rules are bent or broken to reveal the true beauty of language.

To some extent, and in general, rules won't "take" unless they conform somewhat with native predispositions. Our genetics and biology form a tether that gives us some "play," some elbow-room, but prevents us from being infinitely plastic.

Yeah, it was from a stint teaching kids in a primary school in a small country town in the Bavarian mountains (IIRC) that Wittgenstein started to get some of the ideas that went into his later philosophy. From observation of what you have to do to teach kids, he started to realize the limitations of the philosophy of the Tractatus. Not that it was totally wrong, but that it was a special case in a bigger picture. In fact, in terms of the later philosophy, the Tractatus is a more elaborated "language game" thought experiment in itself, a more elaborate version of the toy experiments with grunts and blocks that the PI opens with. Seeing how the "grand philosophies" of the past, the systematic overviews, are themselves fixated-on miniature "language game" examples, helps one see to the core of the function of philosophy - and what goes right and wrong with it. That's why Wittgenstein recommended putting the books side by side and comparing.

One thing to note, the "rules" don't have to be articulate or present to the mind - in many examples they're just "know how", either a habit inculcated by practice (in which case it was conscious, but doesn't have to be any longer, like driving a car), or something we pick up, as we say, "by osmosis," by acute and focused observation, but without already knowing the words for what's going on. As Wittgenstein says somewhere, the bigger part of the apriori is "agreement in use." And then some of the "rules" we live by can come to the surface in consciousness, and can be made explicit, tabled.

Another way of looking at this, is that genetics provides us with a developmental path, an unfolding sequence of particular expectations about how the world, how nature, how the developer's environment, will be; and that includes the social world (e.g. expectations of reciprocity arising at a certain age). Made-up rules that don't go against those deep expectations will tend to be passed along and survive (the first and most important social "carrier" of rules across generations is the family), those that do won't be.

The game metaphor is instructive: games often require some degree of both competition and co-operation. (A useful trope to fix in the mind, a useful thought experiment, is to think of a small child observing some kids playing an unfamiliar game, and then joining in - what's happening there? How does "picking up a game" happen? What are the usual concrete steps?) There's often a layer of tacit co-operation that has to be there before competition can occur. And it's the same when it's just layers of co-operation - there has to be some pre-established harmony of action, agreement in use, before agreement-in-use proper - conscious, or articulated - can get going. (Shades of Aristotle's Prime Mover argument for God!)

However, how do we know the rules of the language game to start with? Are they indoctrinated (in some negative sense) to an individual through repetition and training? Would this be the primary function of 'schools' and 'education'? — Posty McPostface

Several people have talked about this in a general sense, but I don't think anyone has expressed it directly - humans are born with an innate, genetic language capability. Many of the rules of language, or at least the rules that set the rules, are built into us. Also, a lot of our language skills, practices, are set by interactions between babies and mothers at a very early age.

Stepping out on more of a limb - I think it also goes further than that. Our minds are set up to accomplish specific tasks that have to do with living in a world like the one we evolved in. That limits the kind of things we can think and, therefore, speak about.

Are they indoctrinated (in some negative sense) to an individual through repetition and training? — Posty McPostface

Why would teaching people to talk coherently be negative? I mean... you could try to raise a kid without language and just let him garble at things instead of speaking...but that would be tantamount to child abuse. How's he going to get along in life? Unless you want to condemn him to live as a hermit among people, language is a must.

Rules exist foremost to help us--if everyone ran around calling a tree or car or person by other sounds and words, we'd have a very hard time getting anything done.

That being said, there are oppressive ways to manipulate language rules to exclude (jargon, class distinctions, etc.) or to keep in place/obscure (Orwellian doublespeak, i.e. "false facts" :shade: ).

Why would teaching people to talk coherently be negative? I mean... you could try to raise a kid without language and just let him garble at things instead of speaking...but that would be tantamount to child abuse. How's he going to get along in life? Unless you want to condemn him to live as a hermit among people, language is a must. — NKBJ

Well, there are some parts of learning a language game that might be positive and where it might be negative. Obviously, if we're talking about teaching babies or young children how to operate or learn a language without an issue, then that's not a negative. My sentiment was more geared towards issues like teaching young adults about how to perceive the world, where indoctrination can occur.

However, how do we know the rules of the language game to start with? — Posty McPostface

The best way to understand the rules of language is to think of how children learn to use different words. For example, using the ostensive definition model, we say cup while pointing to a cup. So we know the child learns the rule/s by observing how they use the word cup. In this case, knowing how to associate the word with the correct object is learning the rule/s. Of course it gets much more complicated, because there are many different kinds of cups. Moreover, some words have no objects associated with them (for e.g., it, and, the, nothing, time, know, etc), but the tendency (and a common mistake) is still to look for the things that correspond to the word, and this is where we can and do go wrong. This is a common mistake that causes confusion across a wide range of subjects. Correctly understanding how rules are developed is also to understand why it is not possible to have a private language. However, don't confuse this with using the language you know, privately, there is a difference. The language you know has its roots in a community, and this is an extremely important point when it comes to understanding what it means to follow a rule, or not follow a rule.

There are other rules that are associated with language, and these rules are the rules of grammar, but these rules tend to be explicit. Here, of course, we are speaking primarily of how we link words together to form sentences, and all the associated rules of English, or German, or French, etc.

Many people think that a dictionary spells out the correct use of words, but if you think about it, dictionaries came much later in the history of language. How did people know how to correctly use a word before the printed word? We simply learned to use words in a community of language users. We learned what it means to correctly use a word, and we learned what it meant to incorrectly use a word. The community, for the most part, decides correct and incorrect uses of words. Also use doesn't always determine the correct use of a word, nor does context. There are groups of people who use (in the Wittgensteinian sense) words incorrectly, and there are groups of people who use words incorrectly within a context. So we have to be careful about being too dogmatic about use and context. Although use and context do tell us much about meaning.

Some examples of not understanding the rules of language are seen in the use of phrases and words like, unconscious bias, unconscious thoughts, beliefs, time, thought, soul, nothing, number, etc.

Also use doesn't always determine the correct use of a word, nor does context. There are groups of people who use (in the Wittgensteinian sense) words incorrectly, and there are groups of people who use words incorrectly within a context. So we have to be careful about being too dogmatic about use and context. Although use and context do tell us much about meaning. — Sam26

I think you brought up an important issue that Wittgenstein tried to address in his On Certainty. Would you be able to expand on this issue a little more? I'm genuinely interested.

I think you brought up an important issue that Wittgenstein tried to address in his On Certainty. Would you be able to expand on this issue a little more? I'm genuinely interested. — Posty McPostface

With regard to On Certainty it seems clear to me that Moore was using "I know..." within a context," but using the words incorrectly, as Wittgenstein points out. Moreover, Moore's use of the word/s is also incorrect; and not only Moore, but I believe, as do others, that the skeptics are also making the same mistakes in terms of context and use, with the word doubt. The point of course is that while use and context tell us much about meaning, one has to be careful about saying, "Meaning is use." Correct use is about the words home, i.e., where it is ordinarily used in a community.

Incorrect use can go on for quite some time. For example, the word soul within a religious community seems to point to something internal to us, as if what gives meaning to the word is the internal thing. This can be seen as incorrect by examining Wittgenstein's beetle-in-the-box example (PI 293). This is not to say that there aren't things going on internally, viz., pains, emotions, or other internal subjective experiences, but it is to say that in order for us to associate meaning with a word there must be external things that we all can see or observe. So the word pain gets it's meaning from how it's used in a community, but there has to be something external for all to see. There has to be something external for us to say, "You're using that word correctly, or incorrectly." Note that Wittgenstein's beetle-in-the-box can be associated with any object, there is no way to tell if we are using the word in the same way - no way to tell if there is an error being made. Whatever is in your box IS the beetle, and whatever is in my box IS the beetle, but they may be two or more different things. The way pain, which we feel internally, gets part of it's meaning is that we can see people moan, cry, express anguish for another, etc. So pain has an external component, but note that Wittgenstein's beetle-in-the-box example has no external component for correct usage to latch onto. The same is true for the word soul in a particular religious context, viz., the religious idea that soul is associated with that mysterious thing that survives death (the internal thing). If one wants to understand the soul one needs only to look at the human bodies in motion - soul is that which animates a body. We observe one's soul while playing music for example, while being kind, while showing empathy, etc.

The point is that many who read Wittgenstein will make the mistake of thinking that Wittgenstein is saying meaning is use, but it's more nuanced than that, or they'll think that context drives meaning; and while use and context are very important, one must be careful about how we think of use and context.

So, just to illustrate what you're getting at Sam, how would you answer the following:

Can there be an action that is morally wrong but contextually right? — Unknown

More about On Certainty...

Philosophers and others want to confine epistemology to their particular theory, which tends to confine the meaning of knowing to their particular use of the word. However, as we read On Certainty Wittgenstein points to the many uses of the word, including words associated with knowing, like certainty and belief, etc. A common misunderstanding, and there are many, is that meaning is associated with the everyday user, but this isn't true. It's not that the everyday user of a term is what determines meaning, as if the man on the street determines meaning, it's that the everyday use of language is the home of how meaning is derived. So in terms of what it means to know, it requires looking at the many uses of the word, being careful not to associate all uses with correct uses. This isn't an easy task, it's very difficult, and it's easy to make mistakes.

I will point out, as I've pointed out, many of the questions and discussions in these kinds of forums are misunderstandings. In fact, most are linguistic misunderstandings.

Note that Wittgenstein's beetle-in-the-box can be associated with any object, there is no way to tell if we are using the word in the same way - no way to tell if there is an error being made. Whatever is in your box IS the beetle, and whatever is in my box IS the beetle, but they may be two or more different things. — Sam26

What makes you say that Sam? Seems confusing, like some inverted Kantian noumena.

So, just to illustrate what you're getting at Sam, how would you answer the following:

Can there be an action that is morally wrong but contextually right? — Unknown — Posty McPostface

If you're asking if something can be generally morally wrong, but in a particular context be morally right or correct, I would say yes, but for me it's not the context that determines this, but a principle. Thus, in many or most cases it's generally agreed that lying is immoral. However, there are cases where lying is morally correct. The classic case is where the SS come to your home asking if you have Jews hidden in your attic (and you do), but you answer "No." For me this is dependent on the principle of harm not the context. This isn't to say that context doesn't have an important role, but that, for me at least, is subservient to other things.

What makes you say that Sam? Seems confusing, like some Kantian noumena. — Posty McPostface

Well, if a group of us have a box with something in it, that only the owner of the box can see and no one else, then whatever is in the box, IS the beetle. Remember I can't see what's in your box, and you can't see what's in my box, so whatever we are associating with the word beetle, is something only the person with his or her box can observe, i.e., it's private. Thus, what you see maybe quite different from what I see. So this is why I say, whatever you see, or I see, IS the beetle, because there is no way to verify if what we're looking at is the same object or thing. This is only true though if it's a completely private thing we're looking at, i.e., there is no way to objectify the thing in the box.

I'm sorry Sam, but this sounds like begging the question to my ears or some epistemic unknown that can never be expressed.

This is only true though if it's a completely private thing we're looking at, i.e., there is no way to objectify the thing in the box. — Sam26

So, it is a noumenal entity. Hence what?

I don't follow your point, flush it out a bit.

I don't follow your point, flush it out a bit. — Sam26

Well, to press your point about there being private content withing one's mind, you can think about it as if one were solipsistic. The limits of my language are the limits of my world. It does not make much sense.

Well, to press your point about there being private content withing one's mind, you can think about it as if one were solipsistic. The limits of my language are the limits of my world. — Posty McPostface

All I'm saying is that meaning is not associated with anything private. Meaning happens as we use language with one another. So the beetle-in-the-box example is to illustrate that point. I would suggest reading some of Wittgenstein it might help, if you haven't already.

All I'm saying is that meaning is not associated with anything private. — Sam26

Yet, you have said the following:

Note that Wittgenstein's beetle-in-the-box can be associated with any object, there is no way to tell if we are using the word in the same way - no way to tell if there is an error being made. Whatever is in your box IS the beetle, and whatever is in my box IS the beetle, but they may be two or more different things. — Sam26

Remember I can't see what's in your box, and you can't see what's in my box, so whatever we are associating with the word beetle, is something only the person with his or her box can observe, i.e., it's private. — Sam26

So, from what I gather, you mean to say that I can have private content; but, speak about everything in a public manner. Was that what Wittgenstein meant to portray with the private language argument?

So, from what I gather, you mean to say that I can have private content; but, speak about everything in a public manner. Was that what Wittgenstein meant to portray with the private language argument? — Posty McPostface

It's more than that, viz., I have private content, but meaning is not derived from my private content. It may be that private content allows for language, but meaning in a given language takes place in the open, not by referring to something private. For example, knowing is not some subjective experience, i.e., the meaning of "to know" is not something private. The problem in much of society today is that we give too much credence to private experiences, as though that's what's important, that's what's primary.

It's more than that, viz., I have private content, but meaning is not derived from my private content. — Sam26

Strange, this whole time I was under the impression that Wittgenstein was pointing towards the illogicality of there being a private language. To be honest, your claim can not in any way or form be verified or falsified, which leads me to believe that it's redundant to talk about private content.

For example, knowing is not some subjective experience, i.e., the meaning of "to know" is not something private. — Sam26

I'm not sure about that; but, there's nothing I can say about any alternative to that matter.

The problem in much of society today is that we give too much credence to private experiences, as though that's what's important, that's what's primary. — Sam26

I agree with that. If you analyze the structure of language, its at odds with how we have emotions in my opinion. Language (at least English) categorizes things into classes; but, emotions don't exist as if in discrete units of measurement. I'm bi-lingual and can appreciate the fact that the grammar of my second language allows for more room to express the private content of my inner mind or something to that matter.

Strange, this whole time I was under the impression that Wittgenstein was pointing towards the illogicality of there being a private language. To be honest, your claim can not be in any way or form be verified or falsified, which leads me to believe that it's redundant to talk about private content. — Posty McPostface

Yes, Wittgenstein does show that a private language is not coherent, at least that's seems to be the argument. So I agree with your first sentence, but I'm not sure what you mean by the last sentence. You seem to be suggesting that I'm either contradicting myself, or that my argument is self-sealing. My question is, what can't be verified or falsified? I'm not sure what you're referring too. The point about the beetle-in-the-box is to demonstrate that meaning isn't derived by pointing to something subjective, so your interpretation of what I'm saying doesn't seem to jive with what I'm saying.

For example, knowing is not some subjective experience, i.e., the meaning of "to know" is not something private. — Sam26

I'm not sure about that; but, there's nothing I can say about any alternative to that matter. — Posty McPostface

Sure there is plenty to be said about the the alternative, viz., that to say that one knows X, is more than just referring to some subjectivity of which I alone am privy. To know algebra, for example is more than just saying, "I know algebra." It needs to be demonstrated objectively that you know how to do the problems of algebra, which is why there are standards by which we measure your knowledge.

My question is, what can't be verified or falsified? I'm not sure what you're referring too. — Sam26

That's the point, you can't refer to private content. It can't be talked about; but, somehow manifests in the way we talk to one another.

The point about the beetle-in-the-box is to demonstrate that meaning isn't derived by pointing to something subjective, so your interpretation of what I'm saying doesn't seem to jive with what I'm saying. — Sam26

For the matter, I don't believe in the objective/subjective trap, and I'm thinking of starting a thread about it. So many people get stuck with the idea or concept that they are speaking objectively or subjectively. How does one know when they are being objective as opposed to subjective and vice versa?

Isn't the whole point/issue about criteria?