I know with certainty that I have a back even though I cannot see it. Furthermore, this is personal subjective knowledge that I cannot doubt. You or Witt could, but I cannot.But Moore said he did know that "here is one hand", which raises the question - how is it possible for Moore to know that "here is one hand". — RussellA
The color red is innate to people with normal color vision, calling it red is a learned cultural convention. — magritte
The color red is innate to people with normal color vision, calling it red is a learned cultural convention. — magritte
Science can only quantify instrumental readings. The readings are interpreted (guessed) to reflect some scientific aspect of nature. Personal experiences are very far from those instrumental readings because we are only presented learned useful perceptions that we can name and potentially act upon.absorption, reflection, diffuse, and opacity spectra under different lighting conditions — ernest meyer
A Plea for Rhees’ Reading of
Wittgenstein’s On Certainty: is
grammar conditioned by certain facts? — Sam26
Seeking continuity, I have in mind the notion of logical space from Tractatus when considering the relation between language and the world... as in, in logical space, anything consistent can be said; but only a small subset of what can be said gives us a picture of the world that is true. So I'm understanding the autonomy of language as somewhat analogous to logical space, but using use instead of mere reference; something like only a small subset of the possible things that might be said are actually useful... — Banno
According to Rhees ([24, p.55]), there is nothing by which our grammar is determined. Here, Rhees is referring to what Wittgenstein calls in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP, [28]) “logical syntax” or “logical grammar” (cf. 3.325). To think that our grammar is determined by something is, by the time of TLP, to think that a symbolism is deter- mined by ontology.
p. 80The arbitrariness feature, an aspect of the autonomy of grammar,
does not mean that it is unimportant, capricious, or even discretionary;
it means, and this point is crucial, that it cannot be said that grammar
is correct or incorrect, right or wrong, by appealing to how things are
in reality (cf. [5]).
p.80In the same vein, Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations ([29], 1953, PI), claims that grammatical rules can be called arbitrary if that means that the purpose of grammar is the same as the purpose of language (cf. PI, §§372, 496, 497), and points out in Zettel (1967, Z) that cookery rules are not arbitrary because cookery is defined by its purpose, while grammar – or language – is not (cf.Z, §320). Thus, “[d]ifferent grammatical rules, unlike different cookery rules, are not right or wrong, but rather determine different concepts”([4, p.193]).3
365. If concept formation can be explained by facts of nature, shouldn’t we be interested, not in grammar, but rather in what is its basis in nature? —– We are, indeed, also interested in the correspondence between concepts and very general facts of nature. (Such facts as mostly do not strike us because of their generality.) But our interest is not thereby thrown back on to these possible causes of concept formation; we are not doing natural science; nor yet natural history a since we can also invent fictitious natural history for our purposes.
366. I am not saying: if such-and-such facts of nature were different, people would have different concepts (in the sense of a hypothesis). Rather: if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not realizing something that we realize — then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to him.
So Moore's language-game doesn't do what Moore thinks it does, viz., provide a proof of the external world. So Wittgenstein rejects Moore's language-game, and all such language-games that amount to a subjective knowing, i.e., the mistaken idea, common in many quarters today, that "I know..." is purely subjective (one's conviction). This idea has wrecked havoc on many belief systems. It's very destructive. — Sam26
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