You can teach something to a kid, a dog or anyone else without being explicit about it. But you can’t do that with tic tac toe. Too complex.

You can also learn something new, which you didn’t know even existed before (so you were not aware that you didn’t know it), by reading the news in the morning. E.g. a new species of mollusc was discovered in someone’s backyard in New Jersey. It’s news to you, so you were not aware of it, nor even of your lack of awareness of it, until you read it. Still, you were objectively unaware of it and at that moment when you chose to read the article, you reckoned that this was something you were unaware of. Otherwise you wouldn’t have read it. Or if you had, you would not have learnt much from it (eg a few added details).

———————-

Anyway... I thought the best part of the OP lecture was its practical implication, that was left unsaid: it is very easy to derail or endlessly stall a philosophical discussion by going into ’semantics’. « Define freedom » can be used to kill any discussion about freedom. Not to say that we should never try to define the meaning of the words we use, but we should be aware that it’s impossible to do so perfectly. A good definition is always a good approximation of some unsayable, ineffable ghost of an idea that we call a concept.

That’s the best one can do: approach them. Human concepts are fuzy, relative, flexible, fluid. They are not easy to pin down. And as Pro Hominem said, that’s the beauty of them. So we shouldn’t indulge in semantics too much.

Popper’s approach, spelled out in the preface to the Open Society, is: Just try and get to the level of precision in language that you need in order to solve or at least describe the problem you are talking about. It’s all a matter of what works, of what’s good enough. Because your definitions are never going to be perfect.

You are forcing language to fit your theoretical preconception of what it must be like, rather than sitting back and looking at what we do with it.

But I'm having a hard time working out what you think. It seems you think that for each word there is an essence that gives the meaning of a word, but that one does not need to know the essence in order to use the word, nor to know that he word has been misused; So I'm wondering what sort of thing this essence is, and what it does.

The essence of "Chair" might be something that is a piece of furniture and has a back and is for sitting on and has four legs. Your notion seems to be that this is decided by the first use, and that any alterations thereto are misuses. So if someone builds a piece of furniture for sitting on with a back and three legs, they are not entitled to call it a chair because it does not match the essence of chair.

But we do call such things chairs, and more besides. Further, despite these being on your account misuses of the word chair, they can be quite successful. Indeed it seems overwhelmingly probable that the number of misuses of the word "chair" far exceeds the number of correct uses.

So pointing out that it is a misuse seems somehow trivial and irrelevant.

What should we make of a theory of language that would label nearly all of our word use as misuse?

What to make of a theory that calls any novel use of a word a misuse?

Why pay it any attention?

You can teach something to a kid, a dog or anyone else without being explicit about it. But you can’t do that with tic tac toe. Too complex. — Olivier5

Okay suppose I taught you tic-tac-toe in the following way. When it's your turn, you ask me where you're supposed to put your "X" or your "O", whichever you're playing. I have a couple options for how to answer this -- I could explain what is equivalent play under a transformation of the board or I could just skip it. Let's say I skip it and I just pick one. I always tell you a move chosen from the set of best moves. I deliberately don't always make the best move myself, so that I sometimes have the opportunity to say, "And when you go here you win." We could change it up. I could feed you a less than optimal move by saying "Try going here," and then I might end up saying, "And when I go here I win."

The main thing I'm trying to leave out is that the way to win is to get three in-a-row. You have to know what games are, that there are turns, that sometimes one of the exactly two of us wins, and sometimes it's a cat, and you get to practice making Xs and Os and maybe lines. If, with repetition, you begin to recognize individual positions and remember which move led to a win, which a loss, and which a cat, do you know how to play tic-tac-toe? If you figure out the three-in-a-row thing, do you now know?

Added: forgot to mention you figuring out the transformations on your own, but you get the idea.

For me to go through this rather tedious charade, i would first need to figure out that you are trying to teach me some new game, which I don’t know how to play yet.

A good definition is always a good approximation of some unsayable, ineffable ghost of an idea that we call a concept. — Olivier5

One must take care here, not to think both of concepts as giving the meaning of a word, and of concepts as some sort of mental furniture - items inside minds. For I can not see the mental furniture inside your mind, nor you the mental furniture inside my mind; and hence, there could be no question of our agreeing as to the meaning of a word. What we do have is the public record of what has been said and done with words, so if we are to reach agreement as to the meaning of a word, we must find it there.

For me to go through this rather tedious charade, i would first need to figure out that you are trying to teach me some new game, but are unwilling or unable to teach me the rules in plain English so you’re just showing to me how it’s played. — Olivier5

But I didn't say anything about rules.

So what?

What we do have is the public record of what has been said and done with words, so if we are to reach agreement as to the meaning of a word, we must find it there. — Banno

I love dictionaries, and I like to compare different definitions from different dictionaries. No need to reinvent the wheel, it’s already been written up. Modern languages are well codified, by and large.

I wasn't setting you up for a "gotcha". Kids play games that only kinda have rules, rules that can change all the time, which is to us an unusual kind of rule, but worth remembering. (Always wanted to teach philosophy taking Calvin & Hobbes as the text.)

So we have a new question: when I tell you where to put your X or your O, I'm telling you in part that doing that is allowed by the rules. Does that mean that you know games have rules? I mean, I could do this with a three year-old and they would be totally stoked and squealing each time they suddenly won! I'm not sure they know games have rules. They know that winning, especially against dad, sounds fun. (At least a couple of my kids say to this day that one of their ambitions is to beat me someday at chess.)

But somehow I've gotten us to talking about this backwards: I started out asking whether you have to know that you don't know how to play tic-tac-toe to learn to play tic-tac-toe, but now I can't figure out how to decide when to say you know how to play tic-tac-toe. How did that happen?

I love dictionaries, and I like to compare different definitions from different dictionaries. No need to reinvent the wheel, it’s already been written up. Modern languages are well codified, by and large. — Olivier5

I'm a dictionary reader, too.

What one finds, on looking up a word, is more words. There's a certain obvious circularity in this process.

If the meaning of a word is the concept to which it corresponds, then meanings are not to be found in dictionaries. They are full of words, not concepts.

Everytime @Banno and I play tic-tac-toe, I wipe the floor with him, but when we play noughts and crosses it's just the opposite.

@Srap Tasmaner, @Olivier5, your focus has been on explicit teaching. What about learning?

Might a child watch a hundred games, wordlessly, then play, flawlessly, yet without explicit teaching?

Genetic neural networks can learn to play well, without explicit instruction.

It is how Capablanca learned how to play chess, and it is said, in tones of deepest wonder, that when Capablanca played chess it was like he was speaking his native language.

Kids play games that only kinda have rules, rules that can change all the time, — Srap Tasmaner

Handball. No adult would ever be able to follow the rules. And even if they did, they wold be different the next day.

For me to go through this rather tedious charade, i would first need to figure out that you are trying to teach me some new game, which I don’t know how to play yet. — Olivier5

Why did you remove the reference to rules? I mean, do as you like. I silently edit posts to fix grammar and punctuation. Whatever.

I'm just wondering if you decided the discussion of rules is a mistake? out of place?

How do you check that someone knows how to play?

Do you have them explicitly list the rules?

Or do you watch them play?

When it's your turn, you ask me where you're supposed to put your "X" or your "O", whichever you're playing. — Srap Tasmaner

That "supposed to" in there looks interesting. We could get around it I guess, and in early days we do. I could just say, "Okay, it's your turn now, try to make an X in this box."

How far can we get before we really really need "should" and friends?

How do you check that someone knows how to play?

Do you have them explicitly list the rules?

Or do you watch them play? — Banno

Imagine I taught one my kids to play tic-tac-toe without rules, and then they try to teach another kid. You don't command the same kind of deference with your peers. "You have to put your X in an empty spot, not on top of my O" (note the "have to"), and then what's the answer to "Why? Why can't I put an X over your O?" It's going to be "That's just how you play." And maybe "Your way is wrong." (And maybe "This is how my dad taught me, do you want to learn how to play or not?")

Or maybe my kid comes back to me and says, "Dad, me and Griselda made up a different way to play tic-tac-toe, and it's better than your way."

Alright so back to my kid explaining the game -- not playing but explaining. Maybe she can get by with "You just don't" instead of "You can't go there", much less, "It's against the rules." So why do people end up saying, you can't go there, you have to go here or here. What does the normative language get you?

(Yes I'm ignoring your questions, and I'm ignoring the invisible answers you printed next to them, unless you really want me to be bored.)

Long ago I wrote some code to take any number up to eight digits and parse it in text - to take 345,114 and write three hundred and forty-five thousand, one hundred and fourteen.

You and I have no trouble in performing this task.

Setting out the rules explicitly... took time. Try it for yourself. One, two, three... trough to twenty; then add one to make twenty one; buy After twenty nine, write thirty. Then it’s reasonably recursive through to a hundred, when you have to introduce and.

Point being, we can perform the task with ease, but working out the rules explicitly is a post hoc, time consuming task.

We often do stuff without explicitly following rules.

Try it for yourself. — Banno

Yeah I've done that one.

If we end up saying normative instruction is (just??) for giving instructions, that looks, well, obvious, but why is it necessary for giving instructions? Is it?

We often do stuff without explicitly following rules. — Banno

You're always slipping in "explicitly" and "explicit". Are you arguing that we do stuff implicitly following rules, or just priming the intuition pump?

Did you ever decide at what point the kid taught tic-tac-toe without rules is playing tic-tac-toe? Is that even a question that makes sense to you? Or is there "no fact of the matter" about whether the kid is, you know, really playing tic-tac-toe? Does their ability to teach another kid to play come into it?

Here's a thought: maybe the normative language is (just??) how we mark something as purpose-relative. Thus

You can't put your X on my O. I mean, you can, but then you're not playing tic-tac-toe. If you want to play the game, you have to put your X in an empty space.

But doesn't that sentence cry out for "if you want to play the game right"?

Is there a difference between playing tic-tac-toe and playing it the right way? Is the latter playing it by the rules? (Knowing that the game has rules, what they are, and how to follow them.)

Yeah I've done that one. — Srap Tasmaner

putting the appropriate space in phone numbers is worse.

You're always slipping in "explicitly" and "explicit". Are you arguing that we do stuff implicitly following rules, or just priming the intuition pump? — Srap Tasmaner

We came in with the notion in the OP that one misused a word by not using it in accord with its essence. Anther way to say this is that the word is misused if it is not used in accord with a certain rule, a rule that sets out an essence.

I'm pointing out that while we might be following a rule, it does not follow that we can say what the rule is.

Hence, being able to state the rule - to be explicit as to what one is doing - is not a prerequisite for following a rule. One can follow a rule without being able to state it.

I'd be surprised if anyone were to insist that we can only follow rules that are explicitly stated. But there's nowt queer as folk.

But doesn't that sentence cry out for "if you want to play the game right"? — Srap Tasmaner

Consider the differences between classical chess and Crazy chess, of 960, or antichess... These are variants in which the rules are explicitly, purposefully, undermined. I've been called a cheat for moving en passent or castling; and indeed at some stage in the development of the game, this would have been true.

Part of what @TheMadFool misses is that word use (what he might call meaning) changes over time. Any judgement that this is the right meaning will inevitably be arbitrary, and most likely become anachronistic with the movement of the linguistic landscape. Noticing the fraught nature of the notion of correct and incorrect use, he might have simply stoped making that distinction; but instead he wrongly accuses Wittgenstein of thinking that all uses are correct.

Better than asking which uses are correct and which are wrong, one might watch what is done in each case.

Much the same confusion is found in

I still think there is such a thing as the essence of a concept, in our mind, but these essences remain forever elusive, intuitive, almost impossible to express precisely. There are literally beyond words, because (IMO) they are the basis for words. — Olivier5

There is an essence, but it cannot be presented, examined, discussed. If that is so, what use is it? Why bother?

But that is mediated by

Popper’s approach, spelled out in the preface to the Open Society, is: Just try and get to the level of precision in language that you need in order to solve or at least describe the problem you are talking about. It’s all a matter of what works, of what’s good enough. Because your definitions are never going to be perfect. — Olivier5

Olivier5 might be able to reconcile these two; to my eye they seem contrary.

Popper’s approach, spelled out in the preface to the Open Society, is: Just try and get to the level of precision in language that you need in order to solve or at least describe the problem you are talking about. It’s all a matter of what works, of what’s good enough. Because your definitions are never going to be perfect. — Olivier5

Yep. Or indeed, the way that definitions are "perfect" is that they only attempt to constrain interpretation in a suitably general fashion. The appropriate level of precision is itself something we seek to communicate in terms of the differences that make a difference vs the differences that don't.

So the problem for naive realists or overly concrete thinkers is that they understand the world as some atomistic composite where every difference must be accounted for. A definition could only be precise if it mentions every possible difference. The problem then is that the potential differences in any "act of conception" are basically endless.

But the pragmatist story on this is that what we want to communicate is exactly where it is that further differences no longer matter to our conception.

If I want you to think about a cat, it doesn't really matter if you are thinking of a black cat or a white cat. Just some kind of average cat - an average level of variation on the theme, on the "family resemblance" - will suffice. That gets the job done in the most efficient way.

So all acts of interpretation are potentially open ended. We could fruitlessly pursue verbal precision to infinity and beyond. Yet the whole point of a pragmatic use of language is that we want to both get across an idea in general, and demonstrate the correct level of generality by our very failure to be more specific.

If "cat" should do the job, you can know that as the listener, because I didn't choose to specify further.

The essence I'm trying to communicate is the idea of a cat in general - a constraint on free possibility at that conceived level of existence. Thus also, as the corollary, whatever I just said was enough. Any difference in conception after that - whether it was black, three-legged, Persian, whatever - is not a fact that matters.

overly concrete thinkers — apokrisis

Band name!

Couldn’t a stool be considered a type of chair? — Pinprick

Only if it was VERY firm.

Have to be Indi...

Only if it was firm. — Janus

Ouch.

There is no teaching tic-tac-toe without rules; my attempt just results in a version with a much larger but equivalent set of ad-hoc rules pretending not to be rules. There still has to be some sense of "may go here; may not go there". I don't see any way around that. And you're not playing tic-tac-toe until you understand it as a rule-governed game. That there can be different but equivalent rulesets is interesting, and I suspect pretty important.

(Want to talk a lot more about rules and normative language, but I've got nothing worth saying yet.)

There is no teaching tic-tac-toe without rules; — Srap Tasmaner

One might think so, but see The Evolution of Learning: An Experiment in Genetic Connectionism, for example. I'd be disincline to call differential weightings in a neural network rules...

There is an essence, but it cannot be presented, examined, discussed. If that is so, what use is it? Why bother? — Banno

Not everything that matters can be expressed with words; some experiences are hard to convey through that sort of code we call a language.

E.g. a painting, and if you like it, your aesthetic emotion when looking at it, cannot be properly described by words used analytically. Only poetry can help. You’d have to be Proust to get anywhere near expressing your satisfaction at getting lost into a little patch of sublime yellow in a Wermer... It doesn’t make paintings useless. It’s a left-brain-right-brain kind of thing.

There are other experiences which point to the existence of a mental ‘hors texte’. Like the sensation of having a word ‘on the tip of your tongue’, or any other case when we are ‘at a loss for words’.