I take the point to be that attempts to establish a theory of language or a theory of meaning, questions of the essence and foundations of language that must be uncovered misleads and confuses us. We are not in need of a theory of language. — Fooloso4
How is what you've said, the point of this? Something still needs to be said about the possibility of debate, as well as agreement. — StreetlightX
129. The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something a because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of their inquiry do not strike people at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck them. a And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.
130. ... Rather, the language games stand there as objects of comparison which, through similarities and dissimilarities, are meant to throw light on features of our language.
131. For we can avoid unfairness or vacuity in our assertions only by presenting the model as what it is, as an object of comparison - as a sort of yardstick; not as a preconception to which reality must
correspond. (The dogmatism into which we fall so easily in doing philosophy.)
"What is a rule? If, e.g., I say 'Do this and don't do this', the other doesn't know what he is meant to do; that is, we don't allow a contradiction to count as a rule. — Sam26
I'm interested in why, were such to be produced, "it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them.". — StreetlightX
But I'm not interested in what the theses are. At least, not in this passage. I'm interested in why, were such to be produced, "it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them.". — StreetlightX
"What is a rule? If, e.g., I say 'Do this and don't do this', the other doesn't know what he is meant to do; that is, we don't allow a contradiction to count as a rule.
— Sam26
'We don't allow it ' means there is a rule against it. The rule of rules. — unenlightened
It is not that there is a rule against it, — Fooloso4
Something still needs to be said about the possibility of debate, as well as agreement. — StreetlightX
What Wittgenstein is saying here is not that there cannot be any philosophical theses, but that should there be, they would be, or so he believes, non-debatable and uncontroversial.
Does this mean that what philosophy advances is just trivial? Wittgenstein said as much to Moore:
[Wittgenstein] said that he was not trying to teach us any new facts: that he would only tell us ‘trivial’ things – ‘things which we know already’; but that the difficult thing was to get a ‘synopsis’ of these trivialities […]. He said it was misleading to say that what we wanted was an ‘analysis’, since in science to "analyse" water means to discover some new fact about it, e.g. that it is composed of oxygen and hydrogen, whereas in philosophy ‘we know at the start all the facts we need to know’ (MWL 114) — Daniele Moyal-Sharrock
FWIW, this reminds me of phenomenology. The stuff that is usually too close for us to notice is uncontroversial, but only after someone manages to see it and point it out. And maybe it can only be pointed out a little bit here and there. ('Form of life' is something like 'by means of a faculty.')We may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place.
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something a because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of their inquiry do not strike people at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck them. a And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful. — W
FWIW, this reminds me of phenomenology. The stuff that is usually too close for us to notice is uncontroversial, but only after someone manages to see it and point it out. And maybe it can only be pointed out a little bit here and there. ('Form of life' is something like 'by means of a faculty.') — pomophobe
I understand your concerns. Still, I read Wittgenstein as pointing to a mostly unnoticed background that makes such disagreements possible/intelligible. Were it not for this background, the debate could not continue. It looks to me that knowledge-how is deeper and prior to the knowledge-that which would like to assimilate it but can't. — pomophobe
There is no background required for disagreement, it is simple difference. — Metaphysician Undercover
Dalk fadlka454df acdmlk(%df dfokmsdfbl)#$kmdsfv mldkfvmlkdfvmdfvlkdfvm )(*342 — Snorf
If you were to ask, what good is agreement, for what purpose do we agree, someone might say that it is required for Knowledge-that. But how is knowledge-that better than knowledge-how? And if this can't be shown what's the point to agreeing? Then unless we agree simply for agreement sake, agreement cannot be automatic. — Metaphysician Undercover
The background is disagreement. It is always there, everywhere, in the background. But what drives us is agreement so most disagreement goes unnoticed. Then it appears like agreement is the background and disagreement springs from agreement. That is, until it strikes you that the real background is disagreement, difference, and this is what is most striking and powerful. — Metaphysician Undercover
IMV, the complete absence of a shared background between people wouldn't even be called disagreement. They wouldn't have anything to disagree about. It seems to me that sharing in the same reality and at least one language is presupposed in an argument. How can I disagree with Snorf from a trans-human dimension when he says
Dalk fadlka454df acdmlk(%df dfokmsdfbl)#$kmdsfv mldkfvmlkdfvmdfvlkdfvm )(*342 — Snorf
And what would I disagree about? When humans disagree, it's not usually an idle question. How best to do things and what should be done in the first place come to mind. — pomophobe
I have a vague sense of agreeing with you, but for me you have turned the page here in a way that I can't follow. In the context that I take for our background, the background is ours. We are on the same stage in front of the same cardboard scenery, hence the metaphor. What you say above reminds me of 'war is god' and other important insights (that conflict/chaos is the mother of order, etc.) — pomophobe
But disagreement is to hold a difference of opinion, just like agreement is to hold a similar opinion. We ought to consider the possibility that each of these may exist without the respective opinions being expressed in language. If we do this, we should see that disagreement is the background of unexpressed opinions — Metaphysician Undercover
There is an issue with your expression of "sharing in the same reality", because one's reality cannot be otherwise from what is present within one's mind. If we want to make a generalization concerning "the reality", then the reality is that each of these animals has a different reality. It is only when human beings come to communicate, and agree, that there becomes such a thing as "the reality". — Metaphysician Undercover
"Our background", is artificial, created through language and agreement. This background of commonality is the mistaken assumption which we must dispense. — Metaphysician Undercover
We tend to assume that this underlying agreement, this common background, "must" exist in order for language to work. But in reality, it's just not there, and that assumption just leads us to different forms of Platonism where the fundamental agreement, and commonality of opinion, precedes human existence. — Metaphysician Undercover
The real background consists of isolated individuals with differing cognitions (disagreement), from which agreement is cultured through training etc.. — Metaphysician Undercover
The kind of misunderstandings which give rise to philosophical problems are, as we have seen, deeply rooted in ordinary thinking; these are features which are hidden not because they are unfamiliar but precisely because they are too familiar. New and unusual things are noticed: everyday occurrences are not. Hence a philosophical discovery does not, as a scientific one so often does, point out something novel and singular (and often meet with scepticism on that account); it points out something which, once seen, seems obvious. For this reason, a philosophical argument is not so often regarded with scepticism and mistrust but treated rather as a mere truism.
The aim of philosophical reasoning is what Wittgenstein calls complete clarity. It is characteristic of his whole conception of the nature of a philosophical problem, that this complete clarity does not lead to the solution of the problem, but to its disappearance. And to say that it disappears instead of being solved, is to emphasize that the origin of the philosophical perplexity is an error, or rather a misunderstanding – a misunderstanding of the logical grammar of the sentences concerned. When the misunderstanding has been healed, the source of the problem has not been ‘solved’, it has Vanished. Wittgenstein says the problem is like a fly in a fly-bottle; and the philosopher’s job is to show the fly the way out of the bottle.
This metaphor has a further significance. To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle is not to describe or demonstrate the innumerable directions in which the fly might fly, but simply to show the one that will take it out of the bottle, and that, incidentally, will also be the way that took it into the bottle. Equally, philosophy does not need to describe or demonstrate the many, often countless, uses of a word or an expression, but only the one – or ones – that will make the problem disappear, and this is a matter of revealing the misconception of the logical grammar of the utterance or expression that gave rise to the problem. — Justus Hartnack
In other words:
We ought to consider that unexpressed opinions can be either an agreement or a disagreement.
If we do this, we should see that all unexpressed opinions are a disagreement.
Yeah, that follows. — Luke
This is a delicate issue. I see the value of the approach that starts within an individual brain/mind and works outward, and it's good for many purposes. But I think it might get in the way of contemplating language. In short, it's tempting but artificial. The background or framework that we are always already in seems to include an elusive sense of The World that is not theoretical. We are just always already in a world of objects that we can talk about, and our primary relationship to these objects is messing with them. And perhaps language in primarily about coordinating our messing with these objects. We don't stare at tools. We use them. And they exist differently for our use than they do for our staring. In short I'm saying that we apply this Heideggerian insight to language and get some of what I find anyway in Wittgenstein. — pomophobe
IMV the correspondence theory of truth, despite all its problems in the ether of speculation, is part of this automatic framework. It's so automatic that even its critics tend to use it as they criticize it. 'The correspondence theory of truth is wrong ---doesn't correspond to truth.' — pomophobe
For me it's the other way around. The automatic and therefore elusive background is genuine. The hammer in the hand that's being employed has a different kind of being than the hammer that's being stared at and described in terms of its density and shape. In the same way we use language automatically even as we construct artificial theories about what we are doing. — pomophobe
For me we don't even consciously assume this background. 'Assumption' is artificial here. The child learns to talk before she learns to talk about her talk philosophically. The stuff closest to us is to close for us to me without straining to notice it. Recall that a more mundane example of the background is just the ability to speak English --along with the largely unfathomed and perhaps unfathomable depths of all this means. — pomophobe
From my point of view, your ability to say 'it's just not there' depends precisely on its being there. You are intelligibly telling me that I am wrong about our shared world, that this background is a mirage or a superstition --- does not correspond to the way things really are. I'm claiming that we talk and act (without consciously assuming it) as if we share a world and can both understand and be understood. When we try to sort this out carefully, we find it hard to tell a consistent story. Our know-how won't fit inside our know-that. Our conscious models tend to run aground, hence the endless debates in philosophy, while the rest of the world just uses this framework that philosophers stubbornly insist on squeezing into a little system of knowing-that.
Words like 'truth' and 'know' are so easy to use when we aren't playing philosophy. They are the hammer driving a nail in a concrete situation. Pluck them out and just stare at them and a debate about these mundane things will rage for centuries. Yet within this same debate they'll be used in the ordinary-primary-easy way without anyone remembering that they don't yet know what they 'really' mean. If the joke wasn't misleading, we might say that what they 'really' mean is whatever philosophers don't mean by them, or when they use them without their thinking caps on. — pomophobe
I understand that approach too. It's a good model when dealing with certain issues. Certainly our collisions with others and objects shape our individual models of or perspectives on the world toward consensus. But we've been doing this a long time! Our species has been designed by the training you mentioned on the genetic level. So I'd say goodbye blank slate and goodbye isolated ego. Yes I can look at an individual human, but that's like looking at a wolf and ignoring to what degree the wolf is a 'cell' in the pack. So the individual wolf is real, but our thinking of the wolf is shallow when we ignore the pack (and then its environment, etc.) With humans the situation is seemingly even more extreme. — pomophobe
Your disagreement is evidence that what I say is true. — Metaphysician Undercover
To change my words from "we should see that disagreement is the background of unexpressed opinions" to "all unexpressed opinions are a disagreement", is not to demonstrate a contradiction but to exemplify a straw man. — Metaphysician Undercover
"Background" implies that there is also a "foreground", so your representation of the background as "all" is unjustified. — Metaphysician Undercover
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