My only other comment on this section is that I'm a bit baffled by this:"One can also imagine someone's having learnt the game without ever learning or formulating rules." If we're talking about chess a la anything like what conventionally counts as knowing chess, I don't think Wittgenstein's claim there makes any sense. — Terrapin Station
'why and how does ostensive explanation pick out this rather than that?' — StreetlightX
Yeah, I agree with your objections about that. Sam's "cup" example didn't cut it, because using "cup" in sentences that people don't have a problem with is nothing like knowing how to play chess, where we mean anything like the conventional sense of what it is to know how to play chess. There's just no way to have learned how to play chess without knowing the rules of playing chess, since each piece has such specific ways it can move, with all of those being different, not being intuitive, etc. — Terrapin Station
For example, if you don't know that a pawn can only move straight forward except when capturing an opponent piece, and only one space at a time forward except on the first move, then it wouldn't make sense to say, with any of the conventional connotations, that "you've learned chess," But if you know that sort of stuff, you've learned the rules. — Terrapin Station
you would know that these are the only possible moves that a pawn could make, without having learned the rules. — Metaphysician Undercover
It doesn't necessarily mean that you have learned rules or that rules have been stipulated in some way prior to the learning of the game. — Sam26
It's a matter of knowing possible moves, rather than a matter of knowing rules. The two are distinct. For instance, I know that these possible actions, walk, bike, drive, take the bus, or take the train, will get me to work. When I want to go to work I simply chose one of these actions, depending on the circumstances. I do not know any rule which states that if I want to get to work I must chose one of these actions, or any such thing. So when I choose a means of getting to work, I am simply choosing a means of getting to work, from the possibilities that I know. I am not following any rule. — Metaphysician Undercover
The analogy doesn't work because there aren't any "rules of getting to work" akin to the rules of chess, especially with respect to what people have in mind when they say that someone has learned chess. — Terrapin Station
32. Augustin's description was "as if the child could already think, only not yet speak".
Wittgenstein damming the notion of a private language. — Banno
That's exactly the point, I can learn the possible moves without learning rules — Metaphysician Undercover
Knowing the particular possibilities is not the same thing as knowing the general "rule", because the latter requires an act of inductive reasoning. — Metaphysician Undercover
Wittgenstein damming the notion of a private language. — Banno
What would the difference be there when we're talking about chess? How do chess rules require inductive reasoning where knowing the possible moves does not? — Terrapin Station
You of course will ask how could the person know these possibilities without knowing the rule, — Metaphysician Undercover
Actually, I'm trying to figure out how "Joe memorized every square the bishop can move to" (ignoring the ridiculous of them doing that without mentally forming an abstraction of it) is different, functionally, than "Joe has learned that the bishop can move only diagonally." — Terrapin Station
My only other comment on this section is that I'm a bit baffled by this:"One can also imagine someone's having learnt the game without ever learning or formulating rules." If we're talking about chess a la anything like what conventionally counts as knowing chess, I don't think Wittgenstein's claim there makes any sense. — Terrapin Station
if the learner already 'knows what a piece in a game is'. That is, if he has already played other games, or has watched other people playing 'and understood'—and similar things. Further, only under these conditions will he be able to ask relevantly in the course of learning the game: "What do you call this?"—that is, this piece in a game.
We may say: only someone who already knows how to do something with it can significantly ask a name.
So you're just saying that it's different in how Joe is thinking about it? — Terrapin Station
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