As with your initial confusion about 'games', they were irrelevant then, and they remain irrelevant now. — StreetlightX
Ah, but did Witty have daddy issues? Can't read the PI without knowing that either. — StreetlightX
My approach here is to simply read it as if for the first time, taking each passage as it comes, and reading it organically. These groups are best suited to first time readers, so that's the assumption I'm operating under. If I'm not dealing with things that are dealt with far later in the text, then yes, that's almost exactly the point (did I need to explain this? To which idiot?). — StreetlightX
You know you're allowed to create your own threads, right? — John Doe
(did I need to explain this? To which idiot?). — StreetlightX
For naming and describing do not stand on the same level; naming is a preparation for description. Naming is so far not a move int he language-game - any more than putting a piece on the board is a move in chess.
If ‘One metre is the length of the Metre Bar’ is not a contingent truth, is it then a necessary truth? Is it a necessary truth that the chess king moves one square at a time? [...] The question needlessly multiplies confusion at this stage. The better question to ask is: What is the role of this sentence? What do we use it for? What is its function in the language-game with metric measurement? The role of this sentence is not to describe how things are, but to present a norm of representation.
But surely, one might object, we can say that it is true that the length of the Standard Metre Bar is one metre? And if it is true, then is it not a statement of fact? We can indeed say that it is true. But the truth-operator is notoriously polygamous, and the moot question is what the truth-ascription amounts to. We can say that it is true that the king in chess moves one square at a time, but that does not make the assertion that the chess king moves one square at a time any the less a statement of a rule of chess. In both cases, all the truth-operation does is to reaffirm a rule. — Baker & Hacker
...the 'defnition', properly interpreted, does not say that the
phrase 'one meter' is to be synonymous... with the phrase 'the length of S at
to', but rather that we have determined the reference of the phrase
'one meter' by stipulating that 'one meter' is to be a rigid
designator of the length which is in fact the length of S at (a given time)
When Wittgenstein suggests (in §50) that the standard metre is the one thing of which we can say neither that it is, nor that it is not, one metre long, he characterizes that as marking its peculiar role in the language-game of measuring with a metre-rule. For if we were to try to represent its length as being one metre, and someone were to ask us what we meant by 'one metre', we could only point to the bar itself - thereby implying that what we had claimed amounted only to the empty 'assertion' that 'this bar is as long as it is'.
In other words, Wittgenstein's suggestion reflects the fact that the standard metre is an instrument of that dimension of our language of measurement; in the system of metric measurement, it is a means of representation rather than something that is represented. Hence, in so far as one can intelligibly remark that 'the standard metre is one metre long', that remark will function as an explanation of what we mean by 'one metre' (or perhaps as an explanation of what we mean by 'standard metre'); it will, in other words clarify the meaning of a word rather than conveying any information about the length of that particular rod or bar.
they arrive at the interesting question (What does this sort of truth-ascription amount to?) then duck it by claiming it is simply a 'moot' question for a 'confused' reader then proceed along unbothered by a question that - it feels to me - ought to at least puzzle us. — John Doe
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