The fact that Dewey used a more ‘ordinary’ vocabulary(did he really? You think his notion of pragmatic is the everyday notion, or a profound change in its sense?) didn’t seem to help him gain acceptance. He was ignored by mainstream psychology for 90 years. In some ways his vocabulary was less accessible or ‘ordinary’ than Heidegger’s. — Joshs

Well, let's not judge others by their popularity, particularly in philosophy (or did you mean psychology?). There seems to be a resurgence in interest in Dewey, and not merely because Rorty thought he was an early postmodern thinker (mistakenly, I think). It appears that some now see him as anticipating continental philosophy and even Wittgenstein in many respects. Some have thought that Dewey's pragmatism bridges the gap between the continental and Anglo-American traditions. Some even have claimed that Dewey and Heidegger held similar views (there is a story, I don't know how accurate it is, that Dewey read something of Heidegger's and remarked that "Heidegger reads like a Swabian peasant trying to sound like me")

Dewey is hard to read, in fact, but not because of his choice of words. His style is simply too dense, and can be tedious.

I can't bring myself to read more Heidegger. It's true I think he was a loathsome man, and unlike others I find it hard to dissociate the man from his writings. I've been told before that if I knew what he meant by the words he used I'd understand him; regardless, I don't feel any need to break the "Heidegger Code." Perhaps some of the fault lies with translation. But I find even his clearer work, such as his essay on the question of technology, to be so infused with Romanticism as to be meritless. Oddly, he wrote very clearly when drafting the speeches he gave as Recktor at Freiburg, praising Hitler and providing philosophical support for Nazi ideology.

OLP would say: imagine examples of when we say something about misunderstanding, and we can investigate the context and criteria and learn what it says about understanding better. Instead, we take our "guilt, hostility, and stress" (our desperate skepticism) out on our ordinary criteria, and abandon them. The step is made because the ordinary ways are subject to failure, and we want something--"a way to understand each other better than we do". Not to make ourselves better, but to start the way langauge works over from scratch and build from the criteria we want. But then we understand everything in one way, built to address or solve all our misunderstandings, at once (dispell or solve our skepticism). And this instead of seeing and learning about the many ways we have come up with over the life of our trying to understand, through what we say when we talk of our misunderstandings (even in idioms — Antony Nickles

Your method reminds me of the social constructionist Ken Gergen.

For Gergen, we only exist as the kind of ordinary, everyday persons we are, within certain, socially constructed, linguistically sustained "living traditions" - within which, what people seemingly talk 'about' (referentially) is in fact, constituted or constructed 'in' their responses to each other in the talk between them. In Gergen's version, such a tradition seemingly exists as "a repository of linguistic artifacts," sustained as such "in virtue of negotiated agreements widely shared within the culture".For him, these socially negotiated agreements influence, not only what we take our realities to be, but also the character of our subjectivities, our psychological make-up.

As Gergen sees it, instead of failures of understanding being crucial (and provoking adaptive reconstructions), "what we count as knowledge are temporary locations in dialogic space - samples of discourse that are accorded status as 'knowledgeable tellings on given occasions’.”

I think what this approach leaves out is the contribution of the subjective dimension, and for that reason it is being supplanted by approaches that integrate olp insights with embodied , enactive perspectives drawing from phenomenologists. A you know, Wittgenstein did not deny that there are such things as biological bodies , his concern was with how we ‘justify’ meaning claims that our empirical models generate.

So it seems to me you could take one of two tacks.
1) You could point to the continuing usefulness of our empirical descriptions of physical, biological and psychological phenomena, only reminding us of the problems that arise by treating these empirical models
and their associated concepts as if they existed outside of the discursive contexts that formed and constantly reform them.

In addition, you could recognize that Wittgenstein’s method of approach is not simply agnostic with respect to empirical science, that is , not just allows that empirical models in general are pragmatically, contextually useful, but that his approach to discourse has specific implications for ways of thinking about the biological and the psychological. A whole range of assumptions concerning the way we talk about concepts like the nature of biological evolution, the processes of affectivity, perception, cognition and language require rethinking after Wittgenstein. .

And this rethinking has taken place, providing alternatives to Cartesian representational models of emotion, perception, empathy, cognition and language. You will find Wittgensteinian and Austinian scholars who embrace these new approaches, including the autopoietic self-organizing systems work of Varela and Thompson, the embodied, embedded, enactive, affective perspectives of Gallagher, Fuchs, and Ratcliffe,
the hermeneutic constructivist ideas of Chiari, the phenomenological contributions of Zahavi.

The advances of these writers allow for an integration of the biological, the psychological and the discursively intersubjective. But they do this not only by re-situating , pragmatising and ‘contextualizing’ the treatment of these issues, but also by adapting Wittgenstein’s contribution such that it takes into account a certain asymmetry between the subjective and the objective poles of contextual sense-formation.In self-organizing systems terms, this is called structural
coupling, At the level of psychological phenomena, it lends to awareness its point of view, the ‘for-meness’ of experience.

The second approach you could take is to dissolve
these approaches within your discursive method, calling them all problematic as long as they refuse to relinquish the subjective in favor of a discursive idealization which denies a role to point of view.

For instance, Matthew Ratcliffe has been working on an approach to experiencing he calls ‘existential feeling.

Ratcliffe fleshed out his approach with elements drawn from the phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Heidegger:

“Both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty add that localized experiences of possibility presuppose a more-enveloping orientation, a sense of belonging to the world. When I see or think about something, when I am afraid of something, and when I am in a bad mood about a wider situation, I already find myself in the world, in a way than differs in kind from intentional experiences in one or another modality (e.g. imagining, perceiving, or remembering something). This ‘world' is presupposed by intentional states of whatever kind with whatever content. We can think of it in terms of a possibility space, a receptivity to types of possibility.”“Things are experienced as significant to us, as mattering to us, in various different ways, something that involves a sense of the possibilities they offer.” (Ratcliffe, 2020


In the following, Ratcliffe shows how communication is affected by subjective alterations in existential feeling.

“The themes of silence and the unsayable have been associated specifically with the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. In addressing the relevant literature, Martin Kusch (2017) introduces the term “linguistic despair” to capture the way in which language’s failure is taken to be unavoidable and insurmountable. The phenomenon he refers to is mentioned explicitly in several well-known autobiographical accounts. For instance, here is how Elie Wiesel (2006, viii-ix) describes the linguistic challenge that one faces:
Convinced that this period in history would be judged one day, I knew that I must bear witness. I also knew that, while I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language. But how was one to rehabilitate and
transform words betrayed and perverted by the enemy? Hunger – thirst – fear – transport selection – fire – chimney: these words all have intrinsic meaning, but in those times, they
meant something else. (viii-ix)

Charlotte Delbo (1985 / 1990, p.3) describes the limitations of language in a complementary way, emphasizing a kind of ‘splitting’ that encompasses language, self, and reality. There is the consensus world that one now inhabits no and there is also the world of
the concentration camp.

2 As Wiesel points out, words such as ‘hunger’ and ‘chimney’ had quite different connotations in that world, in a place where all that one previously took for
granted and that one’s interpreters now take for granted was extinguished. To describe Context A to those residing in Context B, one relies upon words such as x, y, and z, which are familiar to interpreters situated in B. However, those words have importantly different
connotations in A, which are muffled by interpreting them against the backdrop of B. Hence, in order to describe something, one must use words that someone else understands, but that same understanding eclipses the phenomenon in question. As Kusch (2017, p.142) writes,
“the struggle for words is essentially the struggle to communicate the destruction of much of
what in ‘ordinary life’ we take for granted”. There is a loss of ordinarily implicit, pre- reflective certainties that the workings of language more usually presuppose.
If this is what the phenomenon consists in, then it is also something that can arise at the level of the individual, something that can happen to ‘me’ rather than ‘us’, where ‘us’ might be a family, a larger group, or even a whole culture. Of course, there remain important differences. Nevertheless, a particular person can similarly experience the destruction of a habitual world that others presuppose, such that words cannot be successfully exported from one context to the other. For example, Annie Rogers (2007, p.4) describes what she calls the “unsayable” in a way that seems to incorporate this (although it is not the explicit focus of her account): “It was there, as a sixteen-year-old girl, that I stopped speaking for five months, from October to February. I realized that whatever I might say could be misconstrued and used to create a version of ‘reality’ that would be unrecognizable, a kind of voice-over of my truths I could not bear.” Later on, she writes, “Here is the unsayable, where words are spoken, yet fall into disconnection with what they point toward” (p.88). It should be added that the distinction between group-level and individual-level trauma is by no means straightforward. That something happened to ‘us’ does not imply a sense of shared understanding among those who endured it. Where we are concerned with the phenomenology of trauma, what happened to ‘us’ may still be experienced principally as ‘mine’ rather than ‘ours’. For instance, Shay (1994, pp.205-6) reports that some Vietnam veterans did not feel solidarity with fellow traumatized soldiers but instead construed their
disclosures in terms of an adversarial “pissing contest”. The trauma is experienced as something that happened to ‘me’ - something to be endured alone, which is not to be understood by or shared with others.
We might distinguish two phenomena here: (a) a struggle to find the right words oneself; (b) a failure on the part of others to understand those words. One might have the experience of conveying something in an entirely adequate way, associated with the experience of others failing to comprehend one’s words due to their own contingent limitations. Conversely, one might feel that, although one’s words fall flat, certain empathic
individuals still manage to understand. However, (a) and (b) have a common origin and are, in practice, thoroughly entwined. One struggles to find words because something is lost when those words move between contexts, and others fail to understand because a familiar context eclipses an unfamiliar one. The communicative task of the trauma survivor is therefore doubly difficult: the profound gulf between what she endured (and perhaps continued to
endure) and what an interlocutor takes as given
impedes both linguistic expression and
linguistic comprehension. Importantly, the problem does not consist merely in recognizing that words fall short;
one also experiences those words as falling short. Even as they are uttered, there is a sense or feeling of their inadequacy. With this, there is also a more pervasive experience of lack or absence. Something that once seemed integral to the world, like bedrock, is experienced as missing, perhaps altogether lost. My task here is to clarify the relevant phenomenology. Two
broad types of scenario can be distinguished: (i) one shares context B with another person and seeks to relate context A to that person, while experiencing the gulf between where one once was (A) and where both parties are now (B); (ii) one inhabits A in an enduring way, thus experiencing a gulf between where one is now (A) and where the other person is now (B). I will focus principally on (ii), on those cases that involve an enduring experience of loss, in contrast to something that also seems alien to oneself much of the time. However, I also concede that the distinction between A- and B-type scenarios is not clear-cut.”

Are you familiar with the work in the area of the problem of other minds, or the issue of empathy?
— Joshs

Yes, started with, Descartes I wanna say. I think my post of my reading of Witt's lion quote is to show what he discovered about the problem of the other. I
— Antony Nickles

I’m going to take that as a ‘no’. — Joshs

So, we are going to ignore the entire history of the problem of other minds, and start fresh. To say, we do not need to account for the past in order to move forward. I'm sensing that here again we are underestimating the ability for concepts to have an openness and possibility to move into new contexts, etc. That the concepts are instead fixed, closed, an "idea" as if like an "object" to which a word points, like "tree". And even then, don't we have criteria for differentiating a tree from, say, a bush? and then we can address outliers: is a hibiscus that is pruned to have a trunk a "tree"? or a violet grafted to the top of an apple tree? If these things mattered, isn't it possible to discuss and resolve these "new contexts"? Are the criteria of concepts closed, or are people (closing them)?

It may be that if your interests gravitate toward political theory or literature , the approach you are using may be suffice for for those purposes. — Joshs

And this is the move to banish poetry from the republic. To cast out certain subjects (ethics, aesthetics, etc.) from "philosophy" as the Tractatus does, or positivism, or representationalism, etc. Austin will fume over they idea that everything that is not a true/false statement is either irrational or emotion, etc. And here we see one satisfaction of OLP: to bring back our whole world, rather than arbitrarily slicing it in two (as Kant had to).

I sense a gap between the Wittgensteinian approach you are using and the fertile research currently taking place on self-consciousness and empathy. You’ll have to trust me when I say that scholars like Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher have a thoroughgoing familiarity with Wittgenstein, and would claim to embrace his approach. I believe they would say there is more to say about the basis of intersubjectivty and its relation to subjectivity than what you are offering , but which is not at all incompatible with Wittgenstein. — Joshs

I'm getting the feeling here that we want to skip past (understanding) the method of OLP (the important bit), to get it to say a theory that we can then argue with/about (along philosophy's old methods). But we do not yet seem to understand or accept the method, which is, as it were: "the argument". There may be implications to OLP's observations, and even, after having looked at our concepts, (different) goals for philosophy's issues that Austin and Witt have (similarly though, getting philosophy to see that it is--and, with Witt, why it is--not seeing, accepting the variety of criteria and their validity in understanding philosophical issues. But this is not to say that there are not other areas where the method of OLP (investigating our criteria) is useful: science, film, literature, politics, etc.

And so I feel I am, reluctantly, having to recreate the entire Philosophical Investigations backwards, when the whole point is for you to see for yourself if the examples, of what we say when, lead you to the same understanding of the criteria for that concept. And, if not, what is wrong with the example, what is missing from the context, have we overlooked criteria, seen them too generally, etc.--to work out our disagreements along those lines, the conditions and possibilities of each, lets simply say, word.

That said, my guess is these guys [saying "there is more to say about the basis of intersubjectivty and its relation to subjectivity") are both ignoring Witt's constant examination of "subjectivity" (its picture) and his ability to otherwise account for it. Analyzing the picture of representationalism (of the "interior"), and seeing the ordinary ways the personal (the individual) matter and have effect, etc. The Grammar of "us" speaking--and our similarity to the Other (in our separateness)--for example, that an expression reveals who we are (our pain, our defiance, our cowardice). That what is at stake is our responsibility to our expressions as they reveal our character, our soul; that it is we who hide it, wish to remain unanswerable, or wish to be fully expressed, so we no longer have to have anything to do with our words. (Cavell)

“ In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are inter-woven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator.”
- Merleau-Ponty — Joshs

And why can't the "fabric" be our concepts and the lives they are sculpted with, which are there before us (not created by us) but which is adequate for our needs. Does it ensure understanding? No. Are their times when we do not share the same lives, that our language is dead to us, pushed outside its criteria? Yes. But we have ordinary ways to address those failings rather than create a theory which side-steps all the contexts in which misunderstanding comes up.

Is the self a social construct?

I argue that the self is so multifaceted a phenomenon that various complementary accounts must be integrated if we are to do justice to its complexity. — Joshs

- DAN ZAHAVI

Not having read this, I still imagine I will not be able to present anything in a way that will matter to you. Nevertheless, I would argue that the self is as multifaceted as all the ways we can express it in all the various contexts we come across. Most things we say will not express us of course--most of our life is conformity, quite desperation, Emerson and Thoreau will say--as if we do not exist, are not ourselves, until there are moments that define us--our character, over our intellect ("our thoughts")--contexts with criteria that may split us down the middle, require as to be answerable for ourself.

I am interested in the article on Austin and Ryle, as may @Banno, as I have studied both (though Ryle has issues, and Austin has limitations). Perhaps we can swap articles. Mine would be: Cavell on reading Wittgenstein but if you are feeling serious, the explanation/example of OLP in Cavell's finding of a MUST in concepts does a much better job than I have been able to.

Austin will fume over they idea that everything that is not a true/false statement is either irrational or emotion, etc. — Antony Nickles

Speaking of Austin and emotion , at the tail end of Ratcliffe’s paper on failures of language that I quoted
from, he incorporates Austin in his attempt to show how disruptions in situatedness in existential
feeling disconnects us from effective empathy and communication with others. Let me know if you find it problematic.

Here’s the full article :

https://www.academia.edu/39851117/Trauma_Language_and_Trust

Failures of Communication

Loss of trust adds to the experience of linguistic inadequacy in two ways. First of all, it contributes to an all-pervasive sense of impossibility and futility, of a future that no longer incorporates the potential for positive development. The world appears bereft of all those
possibilities associated with trusting relations with others, which include sustaining, repairing, and revising projects, and relating to people in ways that open up new possibilities.
With no prospect of such relations, the future lacks openness, spontaneity, the potential for meaningful and positive alternatives to one’s current predicament - for growth (Ratcliffe, Ruddell, and Smith, 2014). With this, the more specific potential of language is also
curtailed. It is not just that words currently fall short. Given that the future will not deviate in meaningful ways from the present, linguistic shortcomings are inescapable; there is no prospect of overcoming them or, more specifically, for relations with others that might open
up new communicative possibilities. Thus, in its most extreme form, loss of trust freeze- frames the linguistic predicament I have described. Words are not just hollow; they are irrevocably hollow.

However, even in less extreme cases, where some sense of an open, meaningful future remains, there is another way in which loss of trust contributes to an experience of linguistic failure: in addition, to exacerbating the experience of meaning-loss, it undermines the
conditions under which utterances are more usually made, registered, and recognized as successful. In How to do Things with Words, J. L. Austin (1962) addresses how utterances can ‘misfire’, fail to have their intended effects. The experience of meaning-loss already
described constitutes a sense of words somehow missing their targets, veering off course even
as they are uttered.

In its most extreme form, this ‘misfiring’ can amount to a seemingly inescapable form of silencing: you can say whatever you like, but you will still be unable to
say what you strive to say.1But also important for current purposes is Austin’s discussion of “illocutionary acts”, where we do something by saying something. Examples include the likes of announcing, pronouncing, questioning, answering, advising, suggesting, ordering,
promising, warning, and informing. Like all acts, these can be successfully or unsuccessfully performed: “unless a certain effect is achieved, the illocutionary act will not have been happily, successfully performed” (Austin, 1962, p.15). Various factors contribute to whether
or not an illocutionary act is successful, and it is not just a matter of what the speaker does.

Success also requires “uptake” on the part of others (Austin, 1962, p.116).11 We have already seen that, where words seek to convey one context but remain, for
the interpreter, anchored in another, there is lack of uptake. However, Austin’s discussion of illocutionary acts also points to a further impediment. The experience of one’s words being taken up by others depends not just on how one experiences one’s own speech, but also on
how one interprets their responses. Consider the effects of a pervasive loss of trust on whether or not one anticipates and experiences understanding on the part of others. Where there is distrust, one does not anticipate empathy, support, concern, or guidance but, rather,
the likes of threat, condemnation, misunderstanding, derision, and indifference. This has a pervasive impact on the experience of communication.
It is not uncommon for philosophers to assume that the practice of interpreting others depends principally on ascribing two classes of mental states to them, beliefs (which are informational) and desires (which are motivational).12 However, when interpreting the
behaviour and, more specifically the linguistic behaviour, of another person while interacting with her, Austin rightly observes that our utterances and hers do not take the form of bare statements of fact or expressions of desire. The task of understanding one another involves
recognizing a vast number of subtly different illocutionary acts, such as appealing, encouraging, dismissing, inquiring, or challenging. Austin (1962, Lecture XII) classifies them
into five broad types:
• verdictives: giving a verdict
• exercitives: exercising powers
• commissives: committing oneself to doing something
• behabitives: a more heterogeneous group that concern social behaviour (e.g.
congratulating, apologizing, cursing, expositings,specifying how utterances fit into arguments (e.g. I argue, I concede, I assume)

Once this complexity is acknowledged, it becomes apparent how loss of trust can impact on the sense of being understood, having one’s utterance taken up by another person, and equally upon the anticipation of being understood or misunderstood. To anticipate and
experience other people as taking up one’s utterances in certain ways requires trust. Where trust is absent, a respondent’s words and deeds will be taken to involve only certain kinds of illocutionary acts. The prospect of sincerely promising, encouraging, advising out of concern, or questioning out of well-meaning curiosity does not arise; the interpersonal world is bereft
of such possibilities. A sense of communicative failure or even futility may in turn be further exacerbated by an interlocutor’s genuine failure to recognize the person’s predicament, to recognize illocutionary acts such as pleading for understanding and respond accordingly. In
general terms, the feeling of being understood will be lacking and gestures that might otherwise be taken to signal understanding and concern will be experienced as indicating otherwise. As Shay (1994, p.181) remarks in his discussion of traumatized Vietnam veterans:
Democratic process entails debate, persuasion, and compromise. These all presuppose the
trustworthiness of words. The moral dimension of severe trauma, the betrayal of ‘what’s right’, obliterates the capacity for trust. The customary meanings of words are exchanged for new ones; fair offers from opponents are scrutinized for traps; every smile conceals a dagger. (Shay, 1994, p.181)

One thus inhabits a damaged world, which, in the absence of trust, no longer incorporates the
prospect of rebuilding. And integral to this is a way of anticipating and experiencing other people that renders many kinds of illocutionary acts seemingly futile, destined from the outset to fail.
An understanding of fist-person linguistic experience in trauma and emotional upheaval (where the latter is taken to be necessary but not sufficient for the former) therefore
has the potential to inform clinical empathy, where ‘empathy’ is construed in a permissive
way as understanding experiences had by a particular individual. In seeking to comprehend the relevant aspect of experience, we come to see that the first step in an empathic process will not be that of developing a positive understanding of what someone else experiences but, rather, recognizing the nature and extent of the potential gulf between one’s own world and (Ratcliffe, 2015; 2018). What is disrupted is something ordinarily taken for granted as shared by interpreter and interpreted, in the guise of a world that ‘we’ inhabit, in the context of which we have our differing experiences and thoughts. Hence, appreciating the phenomenology of language in trauma requires acknowledging how someone might be uprooted from a world that is more usually presupposed as ‘ours’. Failures of empathy will
occur when one interprets the other person’s experiences against the backdrop of this world, when the relevant experiences are actually symptomatic of its disturbance.

Finding the ability to articulate what has happened and to feel understood can be an important step in the process of recovery, one that may require the assistance of others (e.g. Herman, 1992/1997). A greater understanding of ways in which language may be experienced as inadequate to the reality of trauma therefore has potential therapeutic significance.”

I find even his clearer work, such as his essay on the question of technology, to be so infused with Romanticism as to be meritless. Oddly, he wrote very clearly when drafting the speeches he gave as Recktor at Freiburg, praising Hitler and providing philosophical support for Nazi ideology. — Ciceronianus the White

Infused with Romanticism? How so? BTW, I think that essay would be almost impossible to understand without first having read Being and Time.

Three of the most prominent philosophers of our time were great admirers of Heidegger’s work and found it indispensable ,all were Jews, and all suffered personally as a result of the Nazis. Hannah Arendt , his lover of many years , was also Jewish. I think she was pretty cool, and she didn’t seem to find him loathsome.

I’m also Jewish, and lost relatives to the camps. And I find Being and Time one of the most remarkable works of philosophy I have ever read. Good thing Dewey wasn’t a Nazi, eh? If it ever comes out that he supported Hitler perhaps you may need to undergo hypnosis to expunge your knowledge of his work.

I will check out those links. thanks.

Infused with Romanticism? How so? BTW, I think that essay would be almost impossible to understand without first having read Being and Time. — Joshs

Well, it's been quite some time since I read it, and I'd rather not read it again, but if you're really curious about what I thought of it you might check this:

https://theblogofciceronianus.blogspot.com/2010/06/on-romanticism-and-technology.html

Hannah Arendt , his lover of many years , was also Jewish. I think she was pretty cool, and she didn’t seem to find him loathsome. — Joshs

No doubt, but there's no need to address the psychology and consequences of love affairs between young students and their middle-aged professors.

I speak only for myself, really, and the fact that there are or were Jews who admire Heidegger isn't relevant to my feelings about him. It wouldn't matter to me if he is considered a hero by all good men and women. I understand many think him a great philosopher. I don't, though.

I speak only for myself, really, and the fact that there are or were Jews who admire Heidegger isn't relevant to my feelings about him. It wouldn't matter to me if he is considered a hero by all good men and women. I understand many think him a great philosopher. I don't, though. — Ciceronianus the White

Do you often make ethical judgments about people based on ‘feeling’ and a profound lack of knowledge of their work? You may be less immune to the sort of errors Heidegger made than you think.

Do you often make ethical judgments about people based on ‘feeling’ and a profound lack of knowledge of their work? You may be less immune to the sort of errors Heidegger made than you think. — Joshs

Sigh. Very well. Nazi, schmazi let's say. No harm done. Vale.

Your method reminds me of the social constructionist Ken Gergen. — Joshs

I'm not sure I appreciate words being put in my mouth (and my options prescribed to me) when I have already spoken, as if they are not taken seriously, or that they are easily understood, or we can skip over questions and clarifications to characterizations, and on your terms (not as a call to a different vantage point entirely). I think it is clear that you want to come to a theory to hang on to something internal--"I think what this approach leaves out is the contribution of the subjective dimension"--and that you see me denying that; which I would call, the possibility of the individual. If that is the case, you have an argument with Wittgenstein's observations, not with OLP's methods, and I would re-read (read?) Philosophical Investigations, perhaps putting yourself in the place of the interlocutor. There are a lot of people that "use" what they believe Wittgenstein is saying, theoretically--"But they do this by adapting Wittgenstein’s contribution..."--but that book is a process (they are not statements, but claims for you to see for yourself our ordinary criteria compared to our philosophical desire).

[I--me Tony--require we] relinquish the subjective in favor of a discursive idealization which denies a role to point of view." — Joshs

I deny (Witt denies) the picture (entirely) of the subjective (the "picturing" of it, its being turned into a theory) without denying everything it does for us except the philosophical need for it (in the picture/theory); thus, I don't "favor" another placeholder in the picture, nor are we "denied" a point of view. However, if you think "having" a view (saying it? getting it accepted?) is not hard, subject to suppression, mischaracterization as an easier generality, flat out denied, without power, etc., then perhaps examining the things we say might in these cases reassure you that our criteria are broader and more subtle and open, perhaps enough to give up retreating to grasping onto something within us**.

Both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty add that localized experiences of possibility presuppose a more-enveloping orientation, a sense of belonging to the world. — Joshs

It is this sense of belonging that OLP is trying to restore in each case. “Things are experienced as significant to us, as mattering to us, in various different ways, something that involves a sense of the possibilities they offer.” (as you quote Ratcliffe) And this is an exact description of our concepts; the criteria being the "things": what matters, is significant, important, their possibilities, etc., for us in our lives.

Skepticism is created by this lose of our sense of the world, it being dead to us, unreachable, unresponsive to us; the Other being unknowable--us losing sight of what matters, is significant, important, the hope of the world's possibilities. This loss of the world is not just a philosophical feeling: "Even as [words] are uttered, there is a sense or feeling of their inadequacy." (One way to look at this is our lose of control, and our vulnerability, once we express something; that our words are out there, for us to be read by, held to.) However, the next sentence (as you quote) shows the radical, world-entire, world-ending doubt where philosophy takes it to: "With this, there is also a more pervasive experience of lack or absence. Something that once seemed integral to the world, like bedrock, is experienced as missing, perhaps altogether [enduringly] lost." This ends our trust in our ordinary criteria of our concepts, and philosophy's recourse is to have its own criteria and standards, and take away the context of criteria.

I would say here that we can not cement us and the world together forever, or, as it were, to solve skepticism--to never loose faith again--but OLP shows us the ways of our world, making it again seem possible to operate with that threat, let's say, in the face of the possibility of the world's (or our) loss of interest in us, of the chance of our loss of our ability to participate.

"language’s failure is taken to be unavoidable and insurmountable." *** "how was one to rehabilitate and transform words betrayed and perverted[?]" - Weisel — Joshs

Here is the decisive step to avoid the ordinary criteria of language--language's impossibility to ever reach the world (or our experience)--right next to the call OLP is making: to look for the ways how one can rehabilitate and transform our words having been betrayed and perverted.

“the struggle for words is essentially the struggle to communicate the destruction of much of what in ‘ordinary life’ we take for granted” -- Kusch — Joshs

So this "struggle for words" is a moment--not, importantly, systemic, an ever-present "gulf". This struggle may be a political moment, a moral moment, an existential moment. Cavell will say it is (also) a philosophical moment. Witt will talk of taking down the house of cards that is representationalism, and sorting amongst the rumble for the ordinary concepts to build again. We do most times take concepts and actions and expressions as if they are granted to us without our responsibility to them, as if the life they embody is a given, and we are not necessary (answerable) to sometimes make them intelligible in new contexts, or re-intelligble in a destroyed, perverted time. As you say, to make sure words do not fall "flat" or "short"--that see that we make them fall.

**One way we work to voice the personal is through psychology: "The trauma is experienced as something that happened to ‘me’ - something to be endured alone, which is not to be understood by or shared with others." Therapy "finds" the words to express this pain; as if they are there but we have a desire to suppress them, not be expressed by them--enough to be adversarial to others, as if when we say "our" pain that somehow takes it away from being "mine" (other than the fact of it being in my body, not yours), but isn't this also part of therapy? to see, as a comfort, that they are not alone, the only one to have felt this pain.

I was just telling @Athena about Heidegger's view of technology the other day. Although that is not the topic under discussion here.

Now their will be other ways conversation breaks down, and now it would seem to be helpful to examine each of those through what we say when we have a misunderstanding. And OLP would say: imagine examples of when we say something about misunderstanding, and we can investigate the context and criteria and learn what it says about understanding better. Instead, we take our "guilt, hostility, and stress" (our desperate skepticism) out on our ordinary criteria, and abandon them. The step is made because the ordinary ways are subject to failure, and we want something--"a way to understand each other better than we do". Not to make ourselves better, but to start the way langauge works over from scratch and build from the criteria we want. But then we understand everything in one way, built to address or solve all our misunderstandings, at once (dispell or solve our skepticism). And this instead of seeing and learning about the many ways we have come up with over the life of our trying to understand, through what we say when we talk of our misunderstandings (even in idioms). — Antony Nickles

You continue in your relentless efforts to misrepresent philosophy, in an attempt to validate your claim that there could be such a thing as OLP.

First, I think you need to distinguish between the intention involved with describing what philosophers are doing, and the intention involved with doing philosophy. If you do not allow for this distinction, then "doing philosophy" is an act of describing what philosophers are doing, which is describing what other philosophers are doing, onward ad infinitum, without ever taking into account what a true philosopher is actually doing.

So let's start with the assumption that a philosopher is seeking to understand, attempting to dispel misunderstanding. Misunderstanding, in general, can be characterized as a failure of communication. When there is a failure of communication, what we do is question the speaker, request a clarification on particular matters which are unclear. This is why philosophy is often described as an inquiry, it is an act of questioning. So here we have the foundation for a fundamental distinction between describing philosophy, and doing philosophy. When we describe, we assume to know what is going on, as a fundamental attitude of certainty, allowing one to put words toward making a description. When we do philosophy, we assume not to know, we are seeking knowledge, therefore we request, or ask for descriptions from those who appear more certain, we inquire, in order to dispel one's own misunderstanding.

On that premise, the philosopher does not proceed with any "criteria". Criteria are principles, or rules, for the application of words in description. The philosopher is proceeding from the premise of misunderstanding, to inquire, request a clarification, in order to bring oneself out of misunderstanding into understanding. Therefore no criteria is assumed. The premise is that criteria has failed, the description given, which may or may not have been based in criteria, is insufficient for understanding, so the philosopher is seeking a better description. Criteria is not the answer, to misunderstanding, familiarity is the answer.

At this point, you ought to see how you are making a clean break from Wittgensteinian principles, by seeking criteria for concepts, rather than seeking family resemblances. True understanding is not produced from criteria and concepts, it is produced from the use of words which have a familiarity. So-called "ordinary language' is not based in criteria and concepts. The use of criteria to create concepts, which Wittgenstein called boundaries, is carried out for a particular purpose. That purpose is not the goal of understanding, as I explained above, the goal of understanding involves questioning to develop familiarity. At the base of understanding, in so-called "ordinary language use" is familiarity, not criteria.

The important part here is not that they are common (ordinary) words (@Pantagruel); the point of OLP is that words "embody" the unconscious, unexamined ordinary criteria (not made-up, or philosophically-important criteria)--all of the richness that is buried in them of all the different ways we live. — Antony Nickles

Witt uses OLP to figure out the reason (spoiler: certainty in the face of skepticism) that metaphysics and positivism remove any context and replace our ordinary criteria. He does this by putting their claims/terms back into a context of when we say: "doubt" or "mean" or "mental picture". His other goal (and Austin's) is to show the variety of criteria for different concepts (the different ways concepts are meaningful, how differently they judge, what matters to us in their distinctions), and that each concept has their own ways they work (as opposed to word=world as Witt's nemesis, and that every statement is true/false for Austin). — Antony Nickles

o, to try this again, we are not using an ordinary dialogue or talking about ordinary (non-philosophical) content; that's fine it's just not analytical philosophy. We are examining what the ordinary criteria and context are when we say such-and-such philosophical claim. With "ordinary" maybe not as, conventional, so much as opposed to metaphysical abstract (absent) contexts and pre-determined criteria (the irony that Ordinary Language Philosophy has a weird version of ordinary is not lost on me--they didn't pick the name). Any "force of meaning" here is that if we can agree on the examples and the criteria, you might see what I see--see for yourself. — Antony Nickles

ut by investigating our ordinary criteria for each concept and how they allow for change is to see that it sometimes changes with our (cultural, practical) lives, but also to see that the ordinary criteria of senses of a concept can be extended into new contexts. With the example above, "thought" is externalized (see late Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?) not as limited to/by language, but that our desire for its "originality" and change is a possibility of (within) our concepts because of their criteria and the ordinary ways in which their "conformity" can be broken or pushed against or revitalized (in degenerate times). I guess this is to say I am, "my" "thought" is, not special, so much as, if I want what I say to be special, I am responsible to make that intelligible (which is a possibility of/from our ordinary criteria). — Antony Nickles

In all these quotes, you are speaking of "ordinary criteria". There is no such thing. Criteria only exists in specialized language, logical languages, which are designed for specific purposes. Criteria is designed for a specific purpose, therefore it is not part of "ordinary language". Criteria is not a part of what we call "ordinary". In "ordinary language", understanding occurs through familiarity with the words, not through criteria or concepts.

The reason why OLP becomes self-contradictory, or hypocritical, is that the activity of philosophy, as a quest to dispel misunderstanding in favour of understanding, is itself a specialized activity with a particular goal. Therefore criteria and concepts will of necessity be employed toward that end, and the OL part (relying solely on familiarity) is necessarily rejected as supporting misunderstanding, and not conducive to understanding. If you remove the specific goal (understanding) from philosophy, then it becomes consistent with OL, but that's not philosophy. So OLP is oxymoronic.

The reason why OLP becomes self-contradictory, or hypocritical, is that the activity of philosophy, as a quest to dispel misunderstanding in favour of understanding, is itself a specialized activity with a particular goal. — Metaphysician Undercover

So this was also fundamentally my position. As soon as you descend (ascend?) to meta-analysis you are no longer doing anything that deserves to be characterized as "Ordinary Language." Ordinary language philosophy is more naturally "self-exemplifiying." Viz my earlier comments:

The business of language is to express or explain; if language cannot explain itself, nothing else can explain it. (R.G. Collingwood)

You either use language in its most fundamentally expressive way, or you don't. OLP may be a good way of identifying what is not ordinary language, but the best way of discovering what is is through the use of...ordinary language. As I mentioned elsewhere, there is the typical, and there is the exemplary. And both are in a sense ordinary. But they are also different.

It only makes sense that an inquiry into the nature of ordinary language usage should be an application of the principles of ordinary language. In any dialogue, there is always a "meaning differential" whose resolution is "conversational." The inquiry into meaning is conducted casually and the ongoing conversation is itself the mutual consensus as to ordinary usage.

I was just telling Athena about Heidegger's view of technology the other day. Although that is not the topic under discussion here. — Antony Nickles

Yes, but Sacred Cows are allowed to wander where they will.

I think you need to distinguish between the intention involved with describing what philosophers are doing, and the intention involved with doing philosophy. If you do not allow for this distinction, then "doing philosophy" is an act of describing what philosophers are doing, which is describing what other philosophers are doing, onward ad infinitum, without ever taking into account what a true philosopher is actually doing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Point well taken. What I am explaining is a way of doing philosophy in order to understand our world, ourselves, and philosophy's issues. Philosophy is, however, often about revolutionizing, or re-envisioning, philosophy itself. Where do we get Nietszche from if not in response to Kant? and Kant from Hume, etc. And so OLP must first clear up the grounds. So when I say "philosophy" does this or that, I am referring to a specific "type of philosophy".

The premise is that criteria has failed, the description given, which may or may not have been based in criteria, is insufficient for understanding, so the philosopher is seeking a better description. — Metaphysician Undercover

And I am trying to get at this moment with @Joshs, but this is where two paths are taken. Some philosophers are seeking a better description, but in looking for "better", they get trapped into only accepting a particular answer, say, which will solve the failure of language, words, criteria. Some refuse to acknowledge any statement that could not be answered as true or false. Kant had his own standards for morality and rationality. Plato ended Socrates' questioning by setting a bar for what would meet the forms on knowledge. The refusal, the standard, the bar, are what I mean by criteria set by these philosophers (certainty, universality, pre-determined, infallible, or only fallible in predictable ways, etc.). Now OLP, instead of setting those standards (for the description of our "concepts"--knowledge, intention, ad infinitum), looks for the standards (criteria) to judge what it is to be those concepts and what is important to us about them, by investigating when we say those things, "When we say...", i.e, When I say "I know you are in pain" one example is that I acknowledge, accept that you are in pain. That claim that pain (the person who it is in) is something that is accepted, or denied, is a standard or measure of our description of pain (the "concept" of pain). Acceptance or denial is one way it works, a criteria for that type of working, what is important to us about it--as truth and falsity is one way to measure (one criteria of) what a statement is.

When we describe, we assume to know what is going on, as a fundamental attitude of certainty, allowing one to put words toward making a description. When we do philosophy, we assume not to know, we are seeking knowledge, therefore we request, or ask for descriptions from those who appear more certain, we inquire, in order to dispel one's own misunderstanding. — Metaphysician Undercover

OLP is both claiming to know, and not to know. The first premise is that we do not normally see the criteria for our concepts. Second is that no one knows any better than anyone else (Emerson calls this Genius) about the type of claims OLP is making (about the criteria of what we mean when we say something). But also, that the OLP philosopher is making a claim for everyone, that is its claim to a type of knowledge/understanding, but that claim is able to be clarified or changed based on developing better or more representative samples or contexts. It starts from simply seeing and describing.

At this point, you ought to see how you are making a clean break from Wittgensteinian principles, by seeking criteria for concepts, rather than seeking family resemblances. — Metaphysician Undercover

Family resemblances are part of a picture in contrast to the picture of representationalism. I do not understand how this is either/or with Witt's discussion of criteria?

The use of criteria to create concepts, which Wittgenstein called boundaries, is carried out for a particular purpose. — Metaphysician Undercover

I will grant you that "criteria" for Witt is a term, not all the applications are used--I would say (his term) Grammar is interchangeable--and I admit I have not done a good-enough job differentiating it from all the other senses of "criteria" (I will edit this in at the bottom when I can). But criteria do not "create" (from the PI): having a toothache, sitting in a chair, playing a game of chess, following a rule, believing, seeing, thinking, hoping, etc., but the idea of them as boundaries is well taken, because criteria tell us what type of thing those are. PI # 373. We are investigating what we say when about a concept in order to understand what counts as an instance of it, how it works, what matters to us about it, how we judge under it, etc., which gives us a way of understanding them, ourselves, and philosophy's issues.

The reason why OLP becomes self-contradictory, or hypocritical, is that the activity of philosophy, as a quest to dispel misunderstanding in favour of understanding, is itself a specialized activity with a particular goal.
— @Metaphysician Undercover
***
The business of language is to express or explain; if language cannot explain itself, nothing else can explain it. (R.G. Collingwood)
***
As I mentioned elsewhere, there is the typical, and there is the exemplary. — Pantagruel

OLP is literally letting language--what we say--explain itself. Taking the typical as exemplary; looking at what we typically mean with what we say as exemplary of the structure of our concepts. I do not agree that OLP does not have the same goals as philosophy in general, but, yes, I am asking that you rethink the "specialized activity with a particular goal" that is the method of a tradition of some analytic philosophy.

Yes, but Sacred Cows are allowed to wander where they will. — Ciceronianus the White

Touche'. Fresh meat?

"Even as [words] are uttered, there is a sense or feeling of their inadequacy." (One way to look at this is our lose of control, and our vulnerability, once we express something; that our words are out there, for us to be read by, held to.) However, the next sentence (as you quote) shows the radical, world-entire, world-ending doubt where philosophy takes it to: "With this, there is also a more pervasive experience of lack or absence. Something that once seemed integral to the world, like bedrock, is experienced as missing, perhaps altogether [enduringly] lost." This ends our trust in our ordinary criteria of our concepts, and philosophy's recourse is to have its own criteria and standards, and take away the context of criteria — Antony Nickles

Your analysis of Ratcliffe’s treatment of some heady psychological topics ( ptsd, severe depression) implies an alternative ‘psychotherapy’. I wonder if you are aware
of any writers who have elaborated such a Wittgensteinian alternative to psychoanalytic, cognitive and other approaches. I mentioned Ken Gergen but you seemed a bit hostile toward him.

I read the l article from 1969 you linked to , and re-read PI.

Here are my notes:

There are certain fundamental, irreducible concepts that are implied in all experiences of sense for Witt, Austin,Cavell:

me and other,interaction , better and worse, (felicitous and infelicitous, failure and success, which implies the binary hedonic of affect) , sense, criterion,context, convention, behavior, circumstance, familiar-unfamiliar(another affective
term) , pre-suppose, background-history memory past, present, use, language, game.

Let’s start with me and other. Before being able to say anything else about what ‘me’ or ‘other’ means in any specific context of use, this binary is pre-supposed. As Witt says, a word ‘looks at me’, so there is something that does the looking and something being looked at, even if the specific sense or content of that something is always instantiated in a different game.


There would be no me and no other apart from this relation.
Also irreducible are context, circumstance, game, language, criterion. these point to the two poles of the relation. On the one hand there is the background, the past , the history that alway comes into play to form a context. That is why a context is familiar to me , has a normative dimension. But this past, this history of mine, is not invoked as memory or recollection as if it were being retrieved from storage. My history , my past , works freshly as past as part of the new context of use. In this sense my past is always in front of me. The other pole is that aspect of the context that provides the new criterion, and assures that my context never repeats itself, never repeats the sense of a word. Context is novel and familiar (background history ) at the same time.

The other irreducible feature of a language game is affect. Word contexts can be more or less familiar, more or less felicitous , more or less successfully understood. This is the ethical dimension of language. As you put it “

rds] One way to look at this is our lose of control, and our vulnerability, once we express something; t — Antony Nickles

So what does this tell us about scientific approaches that are currently in use? It tells us that any approach that talks in terms of objects in a box ( let’s say that box is a universe, consciousness, mind or body ) is problematic. And it tell us that any treatment of a history as an already composed progression ( cosmological, biological, child developmental, cultural) is problematic.

Now, most of our sciences do think in terms of pictures. And yet they are undeniably useful to us. our planes stay up in the air, etc. Would they be even more useful to us , or useful in a richer way , if they understood
what Witt was getting at? Could there be such a thing as a post-Wittgensteinian physics or politics or psychology( I think there must be)!and what would that look like? As I’ve mentioned , there are today forms of political and psychological thinking, even biological, that claim to have assimilated Witt’s lessons. And there are the approaches to history that consider it not as an accomplished fact but as genealogy
(Nietzsche, Foucault, Lyotard).

(Here’s a feminist political theorist who integrates Austin,Cavell and Witt in her argument. )

https://web.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/academic-fellows/images/zerilli_nlh_published.pdf

You find Ratcliffe’s account problematic. You seem to find problematic accounts of resistance to communicative understanding due to personally sedimented histories.
But Witt seems to acknowledge the role of background in causing difficulties in understanding.

Witt says “ There are, for example, styles of painting which do not convey anything to me in this immediate way, but do to other people. I think custom and upbringing have a hand in this.”

Custom and upbringing are not objects in a box, we only know them in contexts of use. Nevertheless , there are consonances an dissonances, more and less felicitous relationalities, that can be spoken of usefully as ongoing patterns rather than as simply this momentary difficulty.

What would words like custom and upbringing do for Wittt if we needn’t say more than ‘this moment is this context of use, and now this new moment is a fresh context of use’?
Would this not prevent us from talking about different normative communities and flatten everything down to an utterly undifferentiated sense of contextual change?
Of course, it would also prevent us from talking about problematic uses of language since all contextual uses would simply be equally different.

So if the central ethical question concerns how to achieve optimal communication to avoid suffering, that implies another question: how effective and how intimate can communication be?

Does it indeed depend on two or more persons? Can I have a context of language use with my dog? If so, can I have one with my cat when we play with a string and he anticipates my movements , and I reciprocally anticipate his? Is that a language game? If so, what about my interaction with my gerbil? In other words, if I can be involved in language games with non-human mammals, where do we draw the line between an animal that I can have a language game with and one I can’t’? What would it even mean to draw a line like that? On the basis of what criteria? If you restrict language games to humans, what about pre-verbal infants? We now know that very young infants recognize our facial expressions.

If word use is a mater of a word looking at me, that is, confronting me with an outside that lets me know there is no inside to ‘me’ , why does this outside , this criterion of contextual sense , not extend to rocks and colors and all kinds of sensings that , like a person’s words and gestures, come at me, interrogate me , create new criteria? If con-text is with-person, why is not a non-person also a con-text?
Is there no language game, no felicity or non-felicity , in the changing pragmatic contexts of driving a car, walking to the store? Witt says no, because only in saying is there a context of sense. But then intimacy, felicity, understanding and happiness are at mercy of what happens when I talk with others, and can have no life outside of that talking. It wouldn’t make sense to suggest an understanding that was not a talking, an experiencing of joy that was not a talking

Thank you for taking the time to read the Cavell (on Wittgenstein). I have read the article on Austin, Ryle, etc. and I do have some thoughts I will share later. I do wonder what you thought of the sense Cavell brings to Witt. I can't shake the impression that you looked through the essay to find justification (shared words) for your own theories, rather than addressing the main contentions (which is what we all do ultimately in beginning a reading). I can at this point, thus only address where you seem to go off track.

Context is novel and familiar (background history ) at the same time. * * * Word contexts can be more or less familiar, more or less felicitous , more or less successfully understood. — Joshs

Words do not have contexts, expressions do (actions do). I'm not sure you have OLP's sense that context is not a fixed or not-fixed thing; maybe it helps to think of it as the (undetermined) realm in which misunderstanding gets worked out. What needs to be brought in about the context (of its limitless possibilities) is based on what needs to be straightened out: in which sense of a concept (of "I know") something is said: which circumstances are we in that it does what, compared to what was happening when it was expressed, to the context of our expectations, whether certain consequences should flow, i.e., understanding along what other criteria for how that concept works. Also, felicitous (apt/not apt) is the truth value of an action or expression to its criteria (was the apology done correctly, aptly), not a judgment of context. However, in working out if something was apt it may be necessary to say that in the context of what was happening, it was not apt to apologize (based on the criteria that, say, timing is part of a correct apology).

So what does this tell us about scientific approaches that are currently in use? — Joshs

Well if you mean philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn was, I believe, trying t change the same picture with his discussion of paradigms (not my forte). But I am with Ryle and Witt that philosophy's concerns are not about facts (not that they fly in the face of them)--philosophy does not look to facts. I also believe that positivism's mistakes have led to a sense that science can address the concerns of philosophy (though it has reduced the purview of philosophy over time to such things as morality, meaning, aesthetics, what is the best way to live, etc.

You seem to find problematic accounts of resistance to communicative understanding due to personally sedimented histories. But Witt seems to acknowledge the role of background in causing difficulties in understanding.

Witt says “ There are, for example, styles of painting which do not convey anything to me in this immediate way, but do to other people. I think custom and upbringing have a hand in this.” — Joshs

I do not object to the fact of this, only to the implication of it; where the skeptic is compelled to go with it. Yes, people have different customs and upbringing, but we have ordinary ways by which these differences are addressed. That is to say, the fact of misunderstanding is not cause for throwing out our regular criteria and trying to find some other lesson in it: a need for certainty, a desire to make each individual the holder of all the keys to meaning what they say and whether it is understood; that there is no context, or shared history, or to each his own.

Custom and upbringing are objects in a box, we only know them in contexts of use. — Joshs

Our customs are literally the criteria we see when we look at the use of what we say when (in whatever context to draw out the criteria). They are not in a box (though they may be unexamined), and we do not "only know them" in looking at their use in context, that is exactly what OLP is doing.

Nevertheless, there are... more and less felicitous relationalities, that can be spoke of usefully as ongoing patterns rather than as simply this momentary difficulty of understanding. — Joshs

Yes! Other than changing "relationalities" to "acts or expressions" (concepts), and not "rather than" but, say, "in order to" work out "this momentary difficult in understanding". Say "there are... more and less felicitous actions and expressions that can be spoken of usefully as ongoing patterns to resolve this momentary difficulty of understanding [say, philosophy being stuck when talking about an issue]."

Now, in regular life, we may not discuss a concept's criteria (the "ongoing patterns"), which is where philosophy comes in, but, nevertheless, a conversation may come to that: "You call that an apology! You don't even think you did anything wrong!" (Claiming that, when we say "I apologize", one criteria is that it be a recognition of a wrong done to you.)

Your analysis of Ratcliffe’s treatment of some heady psychological topics (ptsd, severe depression) implies an alternative ‘psychotherapy’. — Joshs

I did not mean to imply that. I think I was merely saying that the fact of psychotherapy is the possibility of actually getting at what we might (want to) think of as unspeakable, beyond words, and to passingly show some reasons why we might want to be unknowable (trauma, repression, the consolation of pity).

Philosophy is, however, often about revolutionizing, or re-envisioning, philosophy itself. Where do we get Nietszche from if not in response to Kant? and Kant from Hume, etc. And so OLP must first clear up the grounds. So when I say "philosophy" does this or that, I am referring to a specific "type of philosophy". — Antony Nickles

I don't see this at all. If Nietzsche's philosophy comes from Kant, and Kant's comes from Hume, then there is a continuum here, not a revolutionizing or re-envisioning, despite the fact that each philosopher claims one's own philosophy to be unique.

he refusal, the standard, the bar, are what I mean by criteria set by these philosophers (certainty, universality, pre-determined, infallible, or only fallible in predictable ways, etc.). Now OLP, instead of setting those standards (for the description of our "concepts"--knowledge, intention, ad infinitum), looks for the standards (criteria) to judge what it is to be those concepts and what is important to us about them, by investigating when we say those things, "When we say...", i.e, When I say "I know you are in pain" one example is that I acknowledge, accept that you are in pain. — Antony Nickles

The problem though, is that as Wittgenstein pointed out, in what you're calling ordinary language, there is no such standards or criteria. There need be no boundaries for me to understand what "game" means. So meaning in its fundamental state (that of ordinary language) exists through the understanding of family resemblances, not through understanding standards and criteria. Therefore if concepts exist through standards and criteria, ordinary language does not rely on concepts. If you want to investigate the standards (criteria) involved when we say "..." in ordinary language, you are imposing a philosophical perspective somewhere where it does not belong. In other words you proceed from a false premise, that there are criteria and standards invlolved when someone says "..." in ordinary language.

Now, philosophy, by its very nature of what it is, as the description of what philosophers do, is to impose such standards and criteria, as philosophy relies on concepts. It is a specific type of activity with a specific goal, so standards and criteria are imposed toward that goal. Therefore there is a fundamental difference, an incompatibility between what philosophers do with language, and what ordinary people do with language, in the ordinary sense. You might insist that there is a "type of philosophy" which proceeds in this way, the way of ordinary language, but all that you would be doing with such an insistence would be practising the other type of philosophy (what I'd call ordinary philosophy), by insisting on such a standard or criteria. That's why it becomes hypocritical. By insisting that there is a special type of philosophy, distinguishable from other types of philosophy, as OLP, you are just practising ordinary philosophy, because every philosopher asserts that theirs is a special philosophy.

I will grant you that "criteria" for Witt is a term, not all the applications are used--I would say (his term) Grammar is interchangeable--and I admit I have not done a good-enough job differentiating it from all the other senses of "criteria" (I will edit this in at the bottom when I can). But criteria do not "create" (from the PI): having a toothache, sitting in a chair, playing a game of chess, following a rule, believing, seeing, thinking, hoping, etc., but the idea of them as boundaries is well taken, because criteria tell us what type of thing those are. PI # 373. We are investigating what we say when about a concept in order to understand what counts as an instance of it, how it works, what matters to us about it, how we judge under it, etc., which gives us a way of understanding them, ourselves, and philosophy's issues. — Antony Nickles

The point is, that we do not judge the meaning of a word, in ordinary language use, through reference to criteria, or whether the thing referred to counts as an instance of some concept. Either we understand what the person is saying, or we misunderstand. If you are investigating to understand what counts as an instance of a particular concept, then you are doing philosophy, and this is not what we do in ordinary language use. You cannot make the two compatible, they are two completely different ways of using language. Ordinary language use has the goal of efficiently getting one through the current situation, philosophy has the goal of a higher understanding.

OLP is literally letting language--what we say--explain itself. Taking the typical as exemplary; looking at what we typically mean with what we say as exemplary of the structure of our concepts. — Antony Nickles

What you don't seem to grasp, is that ordinary language usage is not exemplary of the structure of our concepts. In ordinary language use, we learn how language is used from observation and practise. This does not involve any standards or criteria. And, if we seek the source of meaning in this way of using words, we are led into the maze of family resemblances, not standards or criteria. However, there is a special type of language use, philosophy, which employs standards and criteria. This is exemplary of the structure of our concepts. So, just like mathematics is a special way of using language, which works with concepts, so is philosophy a special way of using language to work with concepts. But we cannot say this about ordinary language, because it doesn't necessarily use concepts.

Now, the challenge might be to use only ordinary language in an attempt to describe what mathematicians and philosophers are doing with language, so that we might readily understand what mathematics and philosophy are. But this would not actually be a case of doing philosophy. It would be a case of describing what philosophy is.

I am asking that you rethink the "specialized activity with a particular goal" that is the method of a tradition of some analytic — Antony Nickles

If you change the goal, then you do not have the same activity. Therefore you ought not call that activity by the same name. And, since you are suggesting a move from a more specific goal to a more general goal, we cannot call the more general a type of the more specific. You are moving in the wrong direction. We might be able to say that philosophy, as a "specialized activity with a particular goal", is a type of ordinary language use, but we cannot turn this around to make ordinary language a type of philosophy.

Family resemblances are part of a picture in contrast to the picture of representationalism. — Antony Nickles

I think family resemblances are more about a contrast to essentialism rather than representationalism.

Having said that, I am enjoying the ambitious discussion and the links to articles you have been providing. :up:

I think family resemblances are more about a contrast to essentialism rather than representationalism — Luke

Well that is good to point out. Witt does say Essence is expressed by grammar, which is to say, what you want from the idea of an “essence” of a thing, you get from examining the ordinary criteria for it.

And by representationalism I thought was the thing Witt first addressed, which is the belief that all language operates like a word corresponds to an object. In any event, consider that essentialism, representationalism, mental processes, metaphysics, positivism, are all different reactions to the same fear; different attempts to do the same thing; all erasing our ordinary criteria in place of a picture made to fit manufactured standards.

Consider that essentialism, representationalism, mental processes, metaphysics, positivism, are all different reactions to the same fear; — Antony Nickles

What fear is that?

What fear is that? — Luke

Well Cavell tags it to scepticism, or the tipping point where all the failures of communication and moral confusion lead to the fear that we are never able to tell or say or judge and so we abandon our ordinary ways of understanding about telling, saying or judging and create one picture for all action and speech based on certainty, universality, prediction, etc. Along with the fear of never being heard, Cavell diagnoses that we remove our criteria in order to remove us (our fallibility) from the equation, our responsibility to what we say and our answerability to the Other.

The problem though, is that as Wittgenstein pointed out, in what you're calling ordinary language, there is no such standards or criteria. There need be no boundaries for me to understand what "game" means. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well I guess I haven't done a good enough job with the examples I've tried to give above (re knowledge, apologies). I know that forms of life and family resemblances hold a big place in the investigations, and what I am saying does not detract or take the place of his point in bringing those up. But if you check the index there is 3/4 of a column of references to criteria of how to tell one thing from another or how a thing works: for raising your arm #625; learning a shape p. 158; of meaning #190, #692; of a mistake #51, etc. There is also the central role of the term Grammar for the concept of how and what ordinary criteria tell us about our concepts.

Well I guess I haven't done a good enough job with the examples I've tried to give above (re knowledge, apologies). I know that forms of life and family resemblances hold a big place in the investigations, and what I am saying does not detract or take the place of his point in bringing those up. But if you check the index there is 3/4 of a column of references to criteria of how to tell one thing from another or how a thing works: for raising your arm #625; learning a shape p. 158; of meaning #190, #692; of a mistake #51, etc. There is also the central role of the term Grammar for the concept of how and what ordinary criteria tell us about our concepts. — Antony Nickles

None of these examples is an instance of "ordinary language". Each involves a case of judgement as to whether or not one has correctly understood, and is therefore a specialized epistemological use of language. Criteria for judgement as to whether or not one is correct, knows such and such, or understands such and such, is epistemology, and therefore specialized language, not examples of "ordinary language". So the examples really do not justify your claim of "ordinary criteria".

Do you see the difference I am pointing to? In ordinary language use we communicate with each other and carry on with our activities respectfully, without hesitation, questioning, or otherwise doubting what the other has said. Understanding is assumed, taken for granted, and we carry on without issue. However, if misunderstanding occurs, it creates a problem, and the problem might be greatly magnified because understanding was assumed, and the person carried on under the assumption of having understood, and therefore proceed into doing the wrong thing which might constitute a significant difference.

If we want to prevent such mistaken activity, which could have very serious consequences in some circumstances, we look for a way to ensure that the person understands. Now, "criteria" comes into play, as providing the means for making a judgement as to whether or not a person adequately understands. However, we are now into a specialized, philosophized, language game, better known as epistemology, we are no longer in the realm of ordinary language. We impose criteria to escape the pitfalls of ordinary language.

The point is to emphasize the two distinct attitudes which underlie these two distinct types of language game. The person engaged in the "ordinary" language game proceeds in activities with a certitude, assuming to have understood what others have said, and that the others understand what oneself has said. There is no doubt here. In the epistemological language game, doubt is a fundamental feature because a higher level of certainty is requested. Therefore we need to produce criteria to ensure that we understand each other.

If we had to employ such criteria in ordinary language, it would become extremely inefficient. We'd be doubting everything each other said, using this type of criteria to confirm that we understood each other, all the time, and this would greatly restrict our activities. So, there is a break, a gap, between ordinary language use, which proceeds with an attitude of certainty, and philosophical language use which proceeds with an attitude of skepticism. If you think that there is such a thing as OLP, then you need to demonstrate how this gap might be closed, to demonstrate consistency between the confidence displayed in the ordinary language game, and the lack of confidence displayed in philosophical language game.

[Each of Witt's examples involving creiteria] involves a case of judgement as to whether or not one has correctly understood, and is therefore a specialized epistemological use of language. Criteria for judgement as to whether or not one is correct, knows such and such, or understands such and such, is epistemology, and therefore specialized language, not examples of "ordinary language". So the examples really do not justify your claim of "ordinary criteria". — Metaphysician Undercover

One, I think we got off on the wrong foot; I tried to make clear above that OLP does not mean "ordinary" as in everyday language, or just language generally, or that people actually discuss these criteria (though they may have to) in making judgements, though OLP is drawing out the ways in which we are making judgements about our concepts such as "whether or not one has correctly understood." I can only say, quickly, that it is better understood as opposed to metaphysical criteria, certainty, universality, predetermined, etc. And, second, yes, this is epistemology. It is a method to discover the unexamined ways in which our concepts work, their grammar. (And also an ethics of epistemology, a comment that the way in which we seek knowledge, and the type of knowledge we seek (the criteria for it), reflects on us.)

Do you see the difference I am pointing to? In ordinary language use we communicate with each other and carry on with our activities respectfully, without hesitation, questioning, or otherwise doubting what the other has said. Understanding is assumed, taken for granted, and we carry on without issue. However, if misunderstanding occurs, it creates a problem, and the problem might be greatly magnified because understanding was assumed, and the person carried on under the assumption of having understood, and therefore proceed into doing the wrong thing which might constitute a significant difference. — Metaphysician Undercover

And I agree we are "ordinarily" (in one of its regular senses) assuming and taking for granted our understanding, and in a misunderstanding we do not usually examine or discuss our criteria (we unconcsiously share the concerns and judgments and distinctions embodied in them (that is to say, we also share our lives, our senses of humor, our expectations, etc, all our forms of life, and desires and distinctions of those are in the criteria of our concepts)--though all of this can break down, they do in traceable ways.

We [philosophers] impose criteria to escape the pitfalls of ordinary language. — Metaphysician Undercover

Now this is where I am trying to point out the philosophy that differs from OLP. Instead of "imposing" criteria to "escape" the pitfalls, OLP is trying to show all the ways we have to carry on in the face of these pitfalls, and that we can not escape and shouldn't impose, but look and work within (or extending beyond). There is no philosophical solution for this failure (nor the implied radical skepticism)--it is our human condition. I tried to work through this with @Joshs above in relation to when words fail us.

Again, this is not philosophy using or justifying "ordinary" language or our games, in the sense of regular, unquestioned, etc., but to say that these games (Witt uses concepts to generalize here) have criteria for how they work, their grammar; these are our ordinary criteria for these concepts. Looking at our ordinary criteria gives us an idea of why philosophers react to solve "the gap" that skepticism takes as absolute and world-ending, by imposing particular (universal) criteria to ensure understanding. But OLP also sees that we are separate and that we do sometimes fail, but that who we are is responsible for our expressions and for our answerability to the Other, our misunderstandings along the regular ways we already have.

So yes, there is a difference between regular unexamined discussion (and the regular ways we repair those) and when philosophy steps in (when the "gap" appears to "open", Cavell says when we are at a loss of what to do). OLP looks at our ordinary criteria to see what they lend to the discussion of philosophical issues; to say, for example, that a question of intention only comes up when something unexpected happens (as I discuss above).

I hope this helps differentiate the sense of ordinary communcation and ordinary (unquestioned) language, from the philosophy that OLP is doing (just don't think about it being called "Ordinary Language" Philosophy) in the tradition of analytic epistemology but with a different version of criteria and different senses of knowledge. and its implications (which I address in my post on Witt's lion quote).

I can at this point, thus only address where you seem to go off track. Words do not have contexts, expressions do (actions do). — Antony Nickles

There are two ways that you’re going to perceive me as going off track. The first is the result of the fact that I have read only a little of Austin and Cavell( although I am making up for that now. I have read Wittgenstein closely in the past but it has been quite a number of years since I looked at his work).
So there will be misunderstandings on my part concerning how their terms are to be treated.

The other way you’re going to misunderstand me is the result of the fact that my interests lie in the areas I mentioned to you ( deconstruction, Heidegger, hermeneutics, constructivism, social
constructionism, phenomenology , autopoietic self-organizing systems theory, Rorty and pragmatism, enactive embodied cognition, Deleuziain bio-politics) and so my use of terms is influenced by that eclectic background rather than Cavell, Austin and Witt.

You don’t yet have any way of knowing this , but I may very well already be understanding the most important features of your reading of Witt, C and A, but am conveying my understanding using a vocabulary that I sense is unfamiliar to you. Would I be correct in assuming you have read little of Husserl, Scheler, Henry, Jonas, Merleau-Ponty, Zahavi, Gallagher , Ratcliffe, Varela, Fuchs, Gergen, Shotter or Gadamer?This may put you at a disadvantage both in conveying the ideas you want to
present and , more importantly , recognizing when other authors, using other vocabularies, are being ‘problematic’, or ‘skeptical’.

As you know it has been at least 70 years since Austin and Witt introduced their work, and in that time, a healthy, vibrant and complex scholarly dialogue has been unfolding in a diverse variety of disciplines , embracing and utilizing Austin, Witt and C , expanding their thinking in many directions.

But when I attempt to introduce this scholarship
to you, I sense that , in contrast with most of the generous and open-mindednacademic engagements between your preferred authors and other strains of philosophy that I see in the literature , you are inclined to wall off Witt, C and A from what you might be almost reflexively inclined to interpret as ‘problematic’.

That means that I may be better off abandoning my attempts to widen the discussion to include
other disciplines , and try instead to fine-tune my use of terms so that they are recognizable to you , as you train me in how you understand them.

Now let me ask about your comment that words do not have contexts, expressions and acts do. If we change any word in an expression , doesn’t it change the
sense of the expression? Is there such a thing as two identical expressions with non-identical
words composing them? What is an act and what exactly is the difference between an act and a word?

philosophy's concerns are not about facts (not that they fly in the face of them)--philosophy does not look to facts. I also believe that positivism's mistakes have led to a sense that science can address the concerns of philosophy (though it has reduced the purview of philosophy over time to such things as morality, meaning, aesthetics, what is the best way to live, etc. — Antony Nickles

My point was that 1) no clear distinction can be made between what philosophy supposedly does and what science does
2) All empirical treatments of ‘facts’ are embedded within and are oriented by an overarching philosophical worldview , whether the researches in that field are aware is it or not, and normally they are not. (Descartes and Newton, Darwin and Hegel, Einstein and Kant, Freud and Nietzsche ). The philosophers of science make explicit thee philosophical underpinnings, but they are what drive and give meaning to any empirical field.
The social sciences are moving. more and more in the direction of abandoning the very notion of account-independent facts.

Custom and upbringing are objects in a box, we only know them in contexts of use.
— Joshs

Our customs are literally the criteria we see when we look at the use of what we say when (in whatever context to draw out the criteria). They are not in a box (though they may be unexamined), and we do not "only know them" in looking at their use in context, that is exactly what OLP is doing — Antony Nickles

That was a typo on my part. I meant that custom and upbringing are NOT objects in a box. BTW, why do we not only know them in looking at their use in context? Are
you saying that we know them outside of local, contingent contexts, that they transcend contexts? No, you’re not saying that , are you? Are you trying to say that shared custom, upbringing , background assure that when move over from context to context a thread of normative continuity allows us to a avoid ‘starting from scratch’ with every new context?

I’ll close this with this from Brandom:

I’m guessing you disagree with it.

Rorty sees the distinction between public and private discourse as a special case of the distinction between thought and talk that takes place within a stable,
shared vocabulary, on the one hand, and thought and talk that transcends such a vocabulary by creating a new, individualized, idiosyncratic vocabulary, on the
other. Community-constitutive acts of forming ‘we’ intentions, and the giving and asking for reasons that such acts are embedded in, are made possible by the shared norms and commitments implicit in our use of a public vocabulary.
Poets and revolutionary scientists break out of their inherited vocabularies to create new ones, as yet undreamed of by their fellows. The creation of novel
vocabularies is an activity we can all partake in to one degree or another, but we should recognize the incommensurability of the vocabulary in which we
publicly enact our concern for the development of the ‘we’ and that in which we privately enact our concern for the ‘I’.

Rorty says:

There is no way to bring self-creation together with justice at the level of theory. The vocabulary of self-creation is necessarily private, unshared, unsuited to argument. The vocabulary of justice is necessarily public and shared, a medium for argumentative exchange.

...my interests lie in the areas I mentioned to you ( deconstruction, Heidegger, hermeneutics, constructivism, social constructionism, phenomenology , autopoietic self-organizing systems theory, Rorty and pragmatism, enactive embodied cognition, Deleuziain bio-politics). — Joshs

I studied Husserl and Gadamer, as well as by Paul Ricoeur, in studying literary theory along with philosophy. I liked the idea of the "event" that Ricoeur discusses, as it brings notice to historicity, which Nietzsche/Hegel wanted to give to morals, and the understanding that an expression is a person saying something at a moment in the face of exigency and context, claiming (at times) their existence, even their non-conformity--but with a future of consequences, responsibility, answerability.

As you know it has been at least 70 years since Austin and Witt introduced their work, and in that time, a healthy, vibrant and complex scholarly dialogue has been unfolding in a diverse variety of disciplines, embracing and utilizing Austin, Witt and Cavell, expanding their thinking in many directions. — Joshs

Well, Cavell just died, but I find that most people are embracing what they see as OLP's (Witt's and Austin's) "theories" or "explanations" and "utilizing" those for their own projects, i.e., not seeing it as a method, but a solution, say, that Witt's "forms of life" suffice for the certainty that philosophy craves. I would say the OLP tradition is carried on, or critiqued constructively, more with Cora Diamond, Steven Mulhall, Crary, Strong, Hammer, Goodman, though my experience with all of those is limited.

Now let me ask about your comment that words do not have contexts, expressions and acts do. If we change any word in an expression, doesn’t it change the
sense of the expression? — Joshs

Maybe, it is case by case for OLP (we are not looking for a general theory). First, I believe you are using "sense" here as in "meaning", as if they were attached to the expression. Witt is trying to show that words (concepts more specifically) do not have an associated "meaning", in the sense of thought: then meaning: then word, or word-object/meaning. Words (concepts) are meaningful to us, which is reflected in their ordinary criteria, as Austin says above (quoted by @Banno): they have been sculpted over our entire existence along the lines of our cares, differences, etc.

Is there such a thing as two identical expressions with non-identical words composing them? — Joshs

So, in light of the above, let's just say: if we change any word in an expression, does it not change a concept from one to another of its senses? (see the various "senses" of knowledge above). Well there are many ways to word a threat (as an example of a concept), and those may or may not affect the various criteria which would change what sense of a threat this is (empty, backed by authority or violence, for compliance to do something, or not to do something, etc.). In addition, what parts of the context come into play for the sense of threat too, say, given to a child, inappropriately to a superior, when the person has no means to comply, etc. All of these examples and ordinary criteria help us to understand that "an expression" has a lot of moving parts in each case, one of which also is one of the most important parts of seeing something said as "an expression" is that it is an event, as I discussed above, and that it is I who is expressing it (I have to defend it, be judged by its being made, follow through with it, etc.)

So, whether we can word two identical expressions with different words may be less of a matter than: it is possible (particularly with a less controversial concept) that the sense of the concept could be "identical" (a particular type of threat) if nothing matters about the context to differentiate the expressions from each other, other than we are still left with the fact that my expression is mine and your expression is yours; that is only to say, if I need to be, I am the one responsible for it, answerable for it--which is no small thing but which nevertheless may not come up. Even with all that, we may be able to say there can be, for all intents and purposes, the "same expression", even in the sense that it might not matter that I said it--but this seems to take all the gas out of it. Sometimes none of this matters, sometimes it does.

What is an act and what exactly is the difference between an act and a word? — Joshs

Well I meant actions and expressions. But an expression is an "act" (or maybe only sometimes--sometimes we just pop off; it begs the interesting distinction though between an action and a movement--perhaps whether it is in or outside a concept), and sometimes expressions are "actions"; they "do" something--Austin will have a lot to say on this. The best intro to Austin would be to read A.J. Ayer and then read Austin's Sense and Sensibilia (though @Banno may have a better idea).

Are you saying that we know [criteria] outside of local, contingent contexts, that they transcend contexts?... Are you trying to say that shared custom, upbringing, background assure that when move over from context to context a thread of normative continuity allows us to a avoid ‘starting from scratch’ with every new context? — Joshs

To say someone "knows" how to use English (its concepts) is to say their judgments, cares, distinctions, (criteria) coincide with each other (though in that is the possibility of much variety, and dissension). This is no small thing, but it is also not the big thing (some idea of "normativity") which philosophy would like it to be--there is no assurance. Now the lack of assurance is one reason philosophy would throw it all out and start entirely from scratch. As well, OLP accounts for the extension of concepts into different contexts than the regular ones which uncontroversially allow it to work along the lines it usually does, however, this extension is a function of, within, the concept itself, and more specifically, the life of our criteria.

I'm not sure why I am reticent to allow it to go unmentioned that maybe we would say expression to expression rather than "context to context"; maybe it is a point you'd like to hold on to, but I would only say, the possibilities lie in the concept and its expression, and the context is brought up (or not) to clarify (afterwards) or in deliberation (ahead of time), not that the concept is changed by the context--we could have the same sense of a concept expressed (same type of threat) and the contexts would only need to align in the ways necessary to allow for the criteria to work as they do in the same way--so that "every context" is different is not as meaningful as: they have differences, but they may or may not matter: to the expression (you deciding to say it, say, at an inappropriate time), or may only matter in the aftermath of you saying something we have to make sense of, or which changes the consequences of the expression (what happens after a threat to your brother may be different than after a threat in an alleyway).

The problem though, is that as Wittgenstein pointed out, in what you're calling ordinary language, there is no such standards or criteria. There need be no boundaries for me to understand what "game" means. — Metaphysician Undercover

One thing I realized I need to clear up. The term "language-game" is to say the games we play with a "concept"--what criteria/grammar describe.

One place I imagine you referring to is #68. He is discussing rigid limits and rules

(I may) use the the word "number" for a rigidly limited concept, but I may also use it so that the extensions of the concept is not closed by a frontier. And this is how we use the word "game". For how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game and what no longer does? Can I give the boundary? No. You can draw one; for none has so far been drawn. — Wittgenstein, PI

(original italics in underline)

Now it is not the point here, but he is not saying that the concept of "game" has no ordinary criteria. One is that it is, as he says, "not closed by a frontier" (he later says it is the kind of concept that has blurred edges (#71)--that is another one of the ways it works, its grammar). He directly says, "And this is how we use the word 'game'." Another criteria, or grammar, for games is that its boundaries and rules are drawn--not set ahead of time. Another is that "What still counts as a game and what no longer does?" is answered by us (that is part of the way the concept of a "game" works). "That's not a game! You're just playing with a tennis racket!" but then I could counter that we are balancing it (a skill) and seeing how long we can (a measure of winning)--are these not some of the criteria of (set for) a game? and do they not allow for a discussion of what counts (criteria) and what matters? Witt is calling out the fear that if rules and boundaries can sometimes be drawn by us, we can't count on anything,which leads to the fixation to have rules take our place.

If you want to investigate the standards (criteria) involved when we say "..." in ordinary language, you are imposing a philosophical perspective somewhere where it does not belong. In other words you proceed from a false premise, that there are criteria and standards invlolved when someone says "..." in ordinary language.
* * *
The point is, that we do not judge the meaning of a word, in ordinary language use, through reference to criteria — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, we can remove "in ordinary language" because we are not opposing that to any other language. I would point out again, also, that "there are criteria and standards involved when someone says '...' " implies that everyday people think about or discuss the criteria for what we say when. Which is not usually the case; though they might. The premise with OLP is that we regularly do not know what the criteria for a concept are (they work behind the scenes as it were), but regular people can come up with them (imagine Socrates questioning the regular people he comes across to provide criteria of the Good). Someone also might discuss them, as I have mentioned above about accusing someone of a half-hearted apology. However, this is a philosophical perspective--to reflect on what we mean (thus on our selves) seems pretty standard philosophical fair. Maybe it helps to say that OLP simply claims that no one necessarily has a better vantage point on our criteria--I can speak for everyone. To say it is "imposed" is perhaps to say we don't need it, language works fine. Which is true, until it is not, which is where traditional philosophy goes off the cliff anyway.

[Philosophy] is a specific type of activity with a specific goal, so standards and criteria are imposed toward that goal.
* * *
If you change the goal, then you do not have the same activity. — Metaphysician Undercover

And OLP is trying to revolutionize the method of philosophy. It is not abandoning philosophy's concerns and issues, if this is what you mean by "goal". But Witt shows that the real desire (what I poorly worded as its "goal") of traditional philosophy (the kind he is pushing against) is to solve the problem of skepticism (close the gap it sees between us and the world and the Other) by imposing its own criteria and standards.

If you are investigating to understand what counts as an instance of a particular concept, then you are doing philosophy, and this is not what we do in ordinary language use. — Metaphysician Undercover

Right, not investigating "what we do in ordinary language use", but "investigating to understand what counts as an instance of a particular concept", which is to say, as you do, OLP is doing philosophy. Its method is to investigate an instance (example) of a concept by looking at: when we say "I know___" to understand what counts, what matters, where the distinctions are made, etc., i.e., the criteria for the concept.

What you don't seem to grasp, is that ordinary language usage is not exemplary of the structure of our concepts. In ordinary language use, we learn how language is used from observation and practise. This does not involve any standards or criteria. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think I've got another misconception. It is not that what we say is an example of the structure of our concepts. We take an example of what we say when to investigate the structure of our concepts--the criteria hidden in what we say when. And, it is exactly philosophy's "standards" for [the explanation of] criteria (universality, certainty, predetermined, "normative") which causes the loss of our ordinary criteria and any use of their context.