The word "I" does not mean the same as "L. W." even if I am L. W., nor does it mean the same as the expression "the person who is now speaking". But that doesn't mean: that "L. W." and "I" mean different things. All it means is that these words are different instruments in our language.
Think of words as instruments characterized by their use, and then think of the use of a hammer, the use of a chisel, the use of a square, of a glue pot, and of the glue. (Also, all that we say here can be understood only if one understands that a great variety of games is played with the sentences of our language: Giving and obeying orders; asking questions and answering them; describing an event; telling a fictitious story; telling a joke; describing an immediate experience; making conjectures about events in the physical world; making scientific hypotheses and theories; greeting someone, etc., etc.) The mouth which says "I" or the hand which is raised to indicate that it is I who wish to speak, or I who have toothache, does not thereby point to anything. If, on the other hand, I wish to indicate the place of my pain, I point. And here again remember the difference between pointing to the painful spot without being led by the eye and on the other hand pointing to a scar on my body after looking for it. ("That's where I was vaccinated".) -- The man who cries out with pain, or says that he has pain, doesn't choose the mouth which says it.
All this comes to saying that the person of whom we say "he has pain" is, by the rules of the game, the person who cries, contorts his face, etc. The place of the pain -- as we have said -- may be in another person's body. If, in saying "I", I point to my own body, I model the use of the word "I" on that of the demonstrative "this person" or "he". — Blue Book

Here's his clever demonstration that 'I' might have my pain in someone else's body.

Another such trouble, closely akin, is expressed in the sentence: "I can only know that I have personal experiences, not that anyone else has". -- Shall we then call it an unnecessary hypothesis that anyone else has personal experiences? -- But is it an hypothesis at all? For how can I even make the hypothesis if it transcends all possible experience? How could such a hypothesis be backed by meaning? (Is it not like paper money, not backed by gold?) -- It doesn't help if anyone tells us that, though we don't know whether the other person has pains, we certainly believe it when, for instance, we pity him. Certainly we shouldn't pity him if we didn't believe that he had pains; but is this a philosophical, a metaphysical belief? Does a realist pity me more than an idealist or a solipsist? -- In fact the solipsist asks: "How can we believe that the other has pain; what does it mean to believe this? How can the expression of such a supposition make sense?"

Now the answer of the common-sense philosopher -- and that, n.b., is not the common-sense man, who is as far from realism as from idealism -- the answer of the common-sense philosopher is that surely there is no difficulty in the idea of supposing, thinking, imagining that someone else has what I have. But the trouble with the realist is always that he does not solve but skip the difficulties which his adversaries see, though they too don't succeed in solving them. The realist answer, for us, just brings out the difficulty; for who argues like this overlooks the difference between different usages of the words "to have", "to imagine". "A has a gold tooth" means that the tooth is in A's mouth. This may account for the fact that I am not able to see it. Now the case of his toothache, of which I say that I am not able to feel it because it is in his mouth, is not analogous to the case of the gold tooth. It is the apparent analogy, and again the lack of analogy, between these cases which causes our trouble. And it is this troublesome feature in our grammar which the realist does not notice. It is conceivable that I feel pain in a tooth in another man's mouth; and the man who says that he cannot feel the other's toothache is not denying this. The grammatical difficulty which we are in we shall only see clearly if we get familiar with the idea of feeling pain in another person's body. For otherwise, in puzzling about this problem, we shall be liable to confuse our metaphysical proposition "I can't feel his pain" with the experiential proposition, "We can't have (haven't as a rule) pains in another person's tooth". In this proposition the word "can't" is used in the same way as in the proposition "An iron nail can't scratch glass". (We could write this in the form "experience teaches that an iron nail doesn't scratch glass", thus doing away with the "can't".) In order to see that it is conceivable that one person should have pain in another person's body, one must examine what sort of facts we call criteria for a pain being in a certain place. It is easy to imagine the following case: When I see my hands I am not always aware of their connection with the rest of my body. That is to say, I often see my hand moving but don't see the arm which connects it to my torso. Nor do I necessarily, at the time, check up on the arm's existence in any other way. Therefore the hand may, for all I know, be connected to the body of a man standing beside me (or, of course, not to a human body at all). Suppose I feel a pain which on the evidence of the pain alone, e.g., with closed eyes, I should call a pain in my left hand. Someone asks me to touch the painful spot with my right hand. I do so and looking round perceive that I am touching my neighbour's hand (meaning the hand connected to my neighbour's torso). — Blue Book

I like W's distinction between the man of common sense and the common sense philosopher. Peirce talked about his philosophy as a kind of common-sense-ism in one essay. The 'gold tooth' is another clever image in his work, along with the ladders and bottles.

The man who is philosophically puzzled sees a law in the way a word is used, and, trying to apply this law consistently, comes up against cases where it leads to paradoxical results. Very often the way the discussion of such a puzzle runs is this: First the question is asked "What is time?" This question makes it appear that what we want is a definition. We mistakenly think that a definition is what will remove the trouble (as in certain states of indigestion we feel a kind of hunger which cannot be removed by eating); The question is then answered by a wrong definition; say: "Time is the motion of the celestial bodies". The next step is to see that this definition is unsatisfactory. But this only means that we don't use the word "time" synonymously with "motion of the celestial bodies". However in saying that the first definition is wrong, we are now tempted to think that we must replace it by a different one, the correct one.

Compare with this the case of the definition of number. Here the explanation that a number is the same thing as a numeral satisfies that first craving for a definition. And it is very difficult not to ask: "Well, if it isn't the numeral, what is it?"

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us. — Blue Book

This was written somewhere in 1933-1934. The 'kind of hunger which cannot be removed be eating' is a great phrase. The definition issue is relevant. The idea that words have some sharp meaning or a small set of sharp meanings, that we can peel the onion and find some perfectly intuitively satisfying semantic atoms....The idea that we ever know exactly what we are talking about...

Language games are the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language games is the study of primitive forms of language or languages. If we want to study the problems of truth and falsehood, of the agreement and disagreement of propositions with reality, of the nature of assertion, assumption, and question, we shall with great advantage look at primitive forms of language in which these forms of thinking appear without the confusing background of highly complicated processes of thought. When we look at such simple forms of language the mental mist which seems to enshroud our ordinary use of language disappears. We see activities, reactions, which are clear-cut and transparent. On the other hand we recognize in these simple processes forms of language not separated by a break from our more complicated ones. We see that we can build up the complicated forms from the primitive ones by gradually adding new forms.

Now what makes us it difficult for us to take this line of investigation is our craving for generality.

This craving for generality is the resultant of a number of tendencies connected with particular philosophical confusions. There is --
(a) The tendency to look for something in common to all the entities which we commonly subsume under a general term. -- We are inclined to think that there must be something in common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general term "game" to the various games; whereas games form a family the members of which have family likeness. Some of them have the same nose, others the same eyebrows and others again the same way of walking; and these likeness overlap. The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple, ideas of the structure of language. It is comparable to the idea that properties are ingredients of the things which have the properties; e.g. that beauty is an ingredient of all beautiful things as alcohol is of beer and wine, and that we therefore could have pure beauty, unadulterated by anything that is beautiful.

(b) There is a tendency rooted in our usual forms of expression, to think that the man who has learnt to understand a general term, say, the term "leaf", has thereby come to possess a kind of general picture of a leaf, as opposed to pictures of particular leaves. He was shown different leaves when he learnt the meaning of the word "leaf"; and showing him the particular leaves was only a means to the end of producing 'in him' an idea which we imagine to be some kind of general image. We say that he sees what is in common to all these leaves; and this is true if we mean that he can on being asked tell us certain features or properties which they have in common. But we are inclined to think that the general idea of a leaf is something like a visual image, but one which only contains what is common to all leaves. (Galtonian composite photograph.) This again is connected with the idea that the meaning of a word is an image, or a thing correlated to the word. (This roughly means, we are looking at words as though they all were proper names, and we then confuse the bearer of name with the meaning of the name.)

(c) Again, the idea we have of what happens when we get hold of the general idea 'leaf', 'plant', etc. etc., is connected with the confusion between a mental state, meaning a state of a hypothetical mental mechanism, and a mental state meaning a state of consciousness (toothache, etc.).

(d) Our craving for generality has another main source; our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is 'purely descriptive'. (Think of such questions as "Are there sense data?" and ask: What method is there of determining this? Introspection?)
— Blue Book

I include long quotes like this so that those new to Wittgenstein can get a taste and still jump into the conversation. Also there's a nice, affordable paperback that includes both the Blue & Brown books.

Note the confusing 'property = ingredient' metaphor which W makes visible as quietly governing the confusion. There's also the general idea of the leaf as a image, which another poster has noted as especially apt. The Ideas/Forms are images.

Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning. Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not treat of dashes on a bit of paper. Frege's ideas could be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life. And the same, of course, could be said of any propositions: Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would be an utterly dead and trivial thing. And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live. And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs.

But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we have to say that it is its use.
If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method we just described of replacing this mental image by some outward object seen, e.g. a painted or modelled image. Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead? -- In fact, as soon as you think of replacing the mental image by, say, a painted one, and as soon as the image thereby loses its occult character, it ceased to seem to impart any life to the sentence at all. (It was in fact just the occult character of the mental process which you needed for your purposes.)

The mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign. (One of reasons for this mistake is again that we are looking for a "thing corresponding to a substantive.")

The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.

As a part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever accompanied it would for us just be another sign. — Blue Book

The replacement of the 'mental image' with some painted, external image is simple but brilliant.

If the 'occult' meaning that gives signs life is use, then naturally use is social, 'extimate,' out there, or rather between rather than inside us. The holist point is also made that the sentence lives in an entire language. This language-as-system reminds me of Saussure (Culler's brief book is great.)

I wanted to lay out some themes and quotes. Hopefully others will join and bring more, as well as react to those presented.

These are interesting points, good job.

Thanks!

Please share more if you feel like it.

I'm working on another thread, analyzing On Certainty.

I'm hoping others will jump in, but I'll proceed in the meantime with a detour through Nietzsche, with a focus on the dominant habit of talking as if the one person per skull were necessary rather than contingent.

As early as 1873, Nietzsche described metaphor as the originary process of what the intellect presents as "truth." "The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual, develops its chief power in dissimulation." "A nerve-stimulus, first transcribed [iibertragen] into an image [Bild] ! First metaphor! The image again copied into a sound! Second metaphor! And each time he (the creator of language] leaps completely out of one sphere right into the midst of an entirely different one." In its simplest outline, Nietzsche's definition of metaphor seems to be the establishing of an identity between dissimilar things. Nietzsche's phrase is "Gleich machen" ( make equal ), calling to mind the German word "Gleichnis"-image, simile, similitude, comparison, allegory, parable-an unmistakable pointer to figurative practice in general. "Every idea originates through equating the unequal." "What, therefore, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms; ... truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions, ... coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal." I hold on here to the notions of a process of figuration and a process of forgetfulness. In this early text, Nietzsche describes the figurative drive as "that impulse towards the formation of metaphors, that fundamental impulse of man, which we cannot reason away for one moment-for thereby we should reason away man himself . . .. Later he will give this drive the name "will to power." Our so-called will to truth is a will to power because "the so-called drive for knowledge can be traced back to a drive to appropriate and conquer."21 Nietzsche's sense of the inevitable forcing of the issue, of exercising power, comes through in his italics: " 'Thinking' in primitive conditions (preorganic) is the crystallization of forms . . .. In our thought, the essential feature is fitting new material into old schemas, ... making equal what is new."22 The human being has nothing more to go on than a collection of nerve stimuli. And, because he or she must be secure in the knowledge of, and therefore power over, the "world" (inside or outside), the nerve stimuli are explained and described through the categories of figuration that masquerade as the categories of "truth." These explanations and descriptions are "interpretations" and reflect a human inability to tolerate undescribed chaos-"that the collective character [Gesamtcharakter] of the world ... is in all eternity chaos-in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms [human weaknesses-Menschlichkeiten] ." As Nietzsche suggests, this need for power through anthropomorphic defining compels humanity to create an unending proliferation of interpretations whose only "origin," that shudder in the nerve strings, being a direct sign of nothing, leads to no primary signified. As Derrida writes, Nietzsche provides an "entire thematics of active interpretations, which substitutes an incessant deciphering for the disclosure of truth as a presentation of the thing itself."
....
The "subject" is a unified concept and therefore the result of "interpretation." Nietzsche often stresses that it is a specifically linguistic figurative habit of immemorial standing : "that when it is thought [wenn gedacht wird] there must be something 'that thinks' is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed." The "insertion of a subject" is "fictitious." The will to power as the subject's metaphorizing or figurating, or introduction of meaning, must therefore be questioned. And Nietzsche accordingly asks, pondering on the "making equal" of proximate sensations, a propos of how "images . . . then words, . .. finally concepts arise in the spirit": "Thus confusion of two sensations that are close neighbors, as we take note of these sensations; but who is taking note?" Nietzsche accordingly entertains the notion of the will to power as an abstract and unlocalized figurative (interpretative) process: "One may not ask : 'who then interprets?' for the interpretation itself is a form of the will to power, exists (but not as a 'being' but as a process, a becoming ) as an affect." Sometimes Nietzsche places this abstract will to power, an incessant figuration, not under the control of any knowing subject, but rather underground, in the unconscious. The Nietzschean unconscious is that vast arena of the mind of which the so-called "subject" knows nothing. As Derrida remarks: "both [Freud and Nietzsche] ... often in a very similar way, questioned the self-assured certitude of consciousness. . . . For Nietzsche 'the important main activity is unconscious.' '' If, however, we want to hold onto "the important main activity" we have to go further than the unconscious, we have to reach the body, the organism. — link

Is it fair to say that 'one person per skull' is an interpretation that's hardened into a (fragile) fact for us in our pre-philosophical mode?

Another key point is this 'entire thematics of active interpretations, which substitutes an incessant deciphering for the disclosure of truth as a presentation of the thing itself.' This is reminiscent of Brandom's Wittgensteinian Geworfenheit.

A characteristic distinguishing feature of linguistic practices is their protean character, their plasticity and malleability, the way in which language constantly overflows itself, so that any established pattern of usage is immediately built on, developed, and transformed. The very act of using linguistic expressions or applying concepts transforms the content of those expressions or concepts. The way in which discursive norms incorporate and are transformed by novel contingencies arising from their usage is not itself a contingent, but a necessary feature of the practices in which they are implicit. It is easy to see why one would see the whole enterprise of semantic theorizing as wrong–headed if one thinks that, insofar as language has an essence, that essence consists in its restless self–transformation (not coincidentally reminiscent of Nietzsche’s “self–overcoming”). Any theoretical postulation of common meanings associated with expression types that has the goal of systematically deriving all the various proprieties of the use of those expressions according to uniform principles will be seen as itself inevitably doomed to immediate obsolescence as the elusive target practices overflow and evolve beyond those captured by what can only be a still, dead snapshot of a living, growing, moving process. It is an appreciation of this distinctive feature of discursive practice that should be seen as standing behind Wittgenstein’s pessimism about the feasibility and advisability of philosophers engaging in semantic theorizing…

…
[T]he idea that the most basic linguistic know–how is not mastery of proprieties of use that can be expressed once and for all in a fixed set of rules, but the capacity to stay afloat and find and make one’s way on the surface of the raging white–water river of discursive communal practice that we always find ourselves having been thrown into (Wittgensteinian Geworfenheit) is itself a pragmatist insight. It is one that Dewey endorses and applauds. And it is a pragmatist thought that owes more to Hegel than it does to Kant. For Hegel builds his metaphysics and logic around the notion of determinate negation because he takes the normative obligation to do something to resolve the conflict that occurs when the result of our properly applying the concepts we have to new situations is that we (he thinks, inevitably) find ourselves with materially incompatible commitments to be the motor that drives the unceasing further determination and evolution of our concepts and their contents. The process of applying conceptual norms in judgment and intentional action is the very same process that institutes, determines, and transforms those conceptual norms.
— Brandom

Finally, we see the connection of (preconscious or unconscious) organism and incessant interpretation in know-how or skill as opposed to know-that or (explicit) method. This requires extending the concept of interpretation to include something like an enacted taking-as that's only incidentally and perhaps secondarily made explicit, if indeed it can in general be made explicit in the first place. As I understand it, none of this is new, but I like throwing these horse-shoes, getting a better grip on them.

Here's a Carnap quote that might be worth talking about:

From the internal questions we must clearly distinguish external questions, i.e., philosophical questions concerning the existence or reality of the total system of the new entities. Many philosophers regard a question of this kind as an ontological question which must be raised and answered before the introduction of the new language forms. The latter introduction, they believe, is legitimate only if it can be justified by an ontological insight supplying an affirmative answer to the question of reality. In contrast to this view, we take the position that the introduction of the new ways of speaking does not need any theoretical justification because it does not imply any assertion of reality. We may still speak (and have done so) of the "acceptance of the new entities" since this form of speech is customary; but one must keep in mind that this phrase does not mean for us anything more than acceptance of the new framework, i.e., of the new linguistic forms. Above all, it must not be interpreted as referring to an assumption, belief, or assertion of "the reality of the entities." There is no such assertion. An alleged statement of the reality of the system of entities is a pseudo-statement without cognitive content. To be sure, we have to face at this point an important question; but it is a practical, not a theoretical question; it is the question of whether or not to accept the new linguistic forms. The acceptance cannot be judged as being either true or false because it is not an assertion. It can only be judged as being more or less expedient, fruitful, conducive to the aim for which the language is intended. Judgments of this kind supply the motivation for the decision of accepting or rejecting the kind of entities.

Thus it is clear that the acceptance of a linguistic framework must not be regarded as implying a metaphysical doctrine concerning the reality of the entities in question. It seems to me due to a neglect of this important distinction that some contemporary nominalists label the admission of variables of abstract types as "Platonism." This is, to say the least, an extremely misleading terminology. It leads to the absurd consequence, that the position of everybody who accepts the language of physics with its real number variables (as a language of communication, not merely as a calculus) would be called Platonistic, even if he is a strict empiricist who rejects Platonic metaphysics.

A brief historical remark may here be inserted. The non-cognitive character of the questions which we have called here external questions was recognized and emphasized already by the Vienna Circle under the leadership of Moritz Schlick, the group from which the movement of logical empiricism originated. Influenced by ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Circle rejected both the thesis of the reality of the external world and the thesis of its irreality as pseudo-statements;6 the same was the case for both the thesis of the reality of universals (abstract entities, in our present terminology) and the nominalistic thesis that they are not real and that their alleged names are not names of anything but merely flatus vocis. (It is obvious that the apparent negation of a pseudo-statement must also be a pseudo-statement.) It is therefore not correct to classify the members of the Vienna Circle as nominalists, as is sometimes done. However, if we look at the basic anti-metaphysical and pro-scientific attitude of most nominalists (and the same holds for many materialists and realists in the modern sense), disregarding their occasional pseudo-theoretical formulations, then it is, of course, true to say that the Vienna Circle was much closer to those philosophers than to their opponents.
— link

http://www.ditext.com/carnap/carnap.html

To talk about the system as a whole is without content. Everything is X is not informative, useless. 'It's all mind.' 'It's all matter.' 'What difference does it make? Who cares and why?'


The acceptance cannot be judged as being either true or false because it is not an assertion. It can only be judged as being more or less expedient, fruitful, conducive to the aim for which the language is intended.

The calculus as a whole is not true or false but merely useful or not. Internally it may contain true or false propositions.

Notably, the Preface to the BB is addressed to Russell to look over with "so many points ... just hinted at". I read that as a modest plea for additions and corrections from a slightly but not too different perspective.

were Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde two persons or were they the same person who merely changed? We can say whichever we like. We are not forced to talk of a double personality. — Blue Book

One has one mind in one's skull. — j0e

At a time, according to W above

these words are different instruments in our language. — Blue Book

but then

the answer of the common-sense philosopher is that surely there is no difficulty in the idea of supposing, thinking, imagining that someone else has what I have. But the trouble with the realist is always that he does not solve but skip the difficulties which his adversaries see, though they too don't succeed in solving them. The realist answer, for us, just brings out the difficulty; for who argues like this overlooks the difference between different usages of the words — Blue Book

The correct answer was skirted in

Shall we then call it an unnecessary hypothesis that anyone else has personal experiences? -- ... is this a philosophical, a metaphysical belief? Does a realist pity me more than an idealist or a solipsist? -- In fact the solipsist asks: "How can we believe that the other has pain; what does it mean to believe this? How can the expression of such a supposition make sense?" — Blue Book

A solipsist's philosophy denies 'others', therefore, since there are no others, only "I" can have pain. The solipsist's experience is purely internal without an outside world. Can a solipsist possibly agree to W's insistence of language making sense publicly? Absolutely not, and my fish in its aquarium agrees with that thinking too.

First...welcome to the thread!

Can a solipsist possibly agree to W's insistence of language making sense publicly? Absolutely not, and my fish in its aquarium agrees with that thinking too. — magritte

I agree that 'meaning is public' clashes with solipsism. For me the 'one mind per skull' theme is interesting because it shows that quasi-Cartesian attempts to start from nothing are confused. They assume --- without justification ---the framework of a single mind in possession of (or composed from) private meanings.

I read that as a modest plea for additions and corrections from a slightly but not too different perspective. — magritte

:up:

...it always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us (from which we after all get the whole matter for our cognitions, even for our inner sense) should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof... — Kant

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendental-arguments/

Heidegger sees skepticism about the external world as a “sham” problem (GA 20: 218), one that one comes to pose only by having embraced a confused ontology. “Starting with the construct of the isolated subject,” one does indeed come to wonder how this “fantastically conceived,” “denatured” entity “comes out of its inner ‘sphere’ into one which is ‘other and external’” (206, 60, GA 20: 223, emphasis added). To refute the skeptical worry that it can’t would indeed “call… for a theory and metaphysical hypotheses” (GA 20: 223). But Being and Time famously insists that we must not answer that call: Kant calls it “a scandal of philosophy and of human reason in general” that there is no cogent proof of [“the existence of things outside us”] which will do away with any scepticism… [But the] “scandal of philosophy” is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again. — link

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290534185_Heidegger_on_skepticism_truth_and_falsehood

Who is a proof of the external world for? I suppose it could be a decoration. 'We already know that we all exist in the same world, but it sure would be nice to have a proof...' Or are we to imagine a thinker in genuine angst, haunted by the possibility that only he is actually 'conscious'? Perhaps he's desperate for a proof, and once he has it he can breath a sigh of relief and love his wife in a new way.

But why isn't a proof needed that there's a solitary voice in a box that may be lost in a dream? That a starting point of methodological solipsism is appropriate is apparently accepted without proof. The anti-skeptic criticizes the skeptic not only for practical irrelevance but for not being skeptical enough, for failing in terms of his own playful project.

But now it may come to look as if there were something like a final analysis of our forms of language, and so a single completely resolved form of every expression. That is, as if our usual forms of expression were, essentially, unanalysed; as if there were something hidden in them that had to be brought to light. When this is done the expression is completely clarified and our problem solved. It can also be put like this: we eliminate misunderstandings by making our expressions more exact; but now it may look as if we were moving towards a particular state, a state of complete exactness; and as if this were the real goal of our investigation. — PI

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54889e73e4b0a2c1f9891289/t/564b61a4e4b04eca59c4d232/1447780772744/Ludwig.Wittgenstein.-.Philosophical.Investigations.pdf

In the context of 'my' skill-focused interpretation, I'd expand on this. 'Meaning' is 'fuzzy,' fuzzier in some places than others. It's a matter of skill to know when to quit, to read between the lines. As another poster has said, logic is a gentleman's agreement. I don't mean symbolic logic, which is relatively quite exact. I mean living logic, talking with others in the world and being understood. The 'gentleman' (who can be man, woman, both, neither) is the 'reasonable person.' I can imagine objections to the fuzziness of this concept, but I suggest that that's how things are. Invent exact languages if you want, but I think it has to be done in the fuzzy metalanguage according to the gentleman's agreement. The impish or confused student can always raise objections, refuse to understand, but life goes on. In fact, at some point we just disregard certain objections as mad or insincere. The ground (shared skill) is in this sense an abyss...or perhaps a fog that obscures the bottom of the castle of meanings.

"But still, it isn't a game, if there is some vagueness in the rules".—But does this prevent its being a game?—"Perhaps you'll call it a game, but at any rate it certainly isn't a perfect game." This means: it has impurities, and what I am interested in at present is the pure article.—But I want to say: we misunderstand the role of the ideal in our language. That is to say: we too should call it a game, only we are dazzled by the ideal and therefore fail to see the actual use of the word "game" clearly. 101. We want to say that there can't be any vagueness in logic. The idea now absorbs us, that the ideal 'must' be found in reality. Meanwhile we do not as yet see how it occurs there, nor do we understand the nature of this "must". We think it must be in reality; for we think we already see it there. 102. The strict and clear rules of the logical structure of propositions appear to us as something in the background—hidden in the medium of the understanding. I already see them (even though through a medium): for I understand the propositional sign, I use it to say something. 103. The ideal, as we think of it, is unshakable. You can never get outside it; you must always turn back. There is no outside; outside you cannot breathe.—Where does this idea come from? It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off. — PI

I have a very basic question: how readable is Wittgenstein? I am familiar with his ideas from various summaries I've read and Great Courses lectures I've bought, but never read him outside short excerpts that lack context.

I have a backlog of very dense reading to get through. I didn't know if it would be like adding more Hegel to that backlog, or if it'd be more straight forward (I find Plato and Aristotle fairly straight forward for example, even if the ideas are very complex and require mulling over).

The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple, ideas of the structure of language. It is comparable to the idea that properties are ingredients of the things which have the properties; e.g. that beauty is an ingredient of all beautiful things as alcohol is of beer and wine, and that we therefore could have pure beauty, unadulterated by anything that is beautiful.

(b) There is a tendency rooted in our usual forms of expression, to think that the man who has learnt to understand a general term, say, the term "leaf", has thereby come to possess a kind of general picture of a leaf, as opposed to pictures of particular leaves. — Blue Book

The Ideas/Forms are images. — j0e

In some ways, they must be.

W brings in both abstract generalizations like beauty and more concrete generalizations like leaf. Both are expressed by word, yet there is distinction between showing some leaves to a child and then some beautiful objects or scenes. A child can easily generalize from one or two leaves. This is not so easy for beautiful clouds or beautiful ideas.

I have a very basic question: how readable is Wittgenstein? I am familiar with his ideas from various summaries I've read and Great Courses lectures I've bought, but never read him outside short excerpts that lack context. — Count Timothy von Icarus

IMO, one of his great charms is that thinkers don't get more readable than Witt. His thought is chunked into little sections but often these sections flow together. I've read some secondary sources that were good, but personally I think W is such a good writer that it's hard to improve the original.

W brings in both abstract generalizations like beauty and more concrete generalizations like leaf. Both are expressed by word, yet there is distinction between showing some leaves to a child and then some beautiful objects or scenes. — magritte

I think that W would say something like 'we shouldn't take this image metaphor too seriously.' Contrast this with Plato or someone who sees that we generalize and invents entities to make sense of it. And these aren't tentatively-held pragmatic entities but (for such thinkers) metaphysical bedrock.

The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple, ideas of the structure of language. It is comparable to the idea that properties are ingredients of the things which have the properties; e.g. that beauty is an ingredient of all beautiful things as alcohol is of beer and wine, and that we therefore could have pure beauty, unadulterated by anything that is beautiful. — W

Lakoff's theories seem to fit in here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff

Beauty is to beautiful things as alcohol is to alcoholic beverages. This metaphor doesn't work upon close investigation, but it's tempting. Family resemblance is an alternative, more flexible conception.

Also, on pictures/images/metaphors:

Metaphor has been seen within the Western scientific tradition as a purely linguistic construction. The essential thrust of Lakoff's work has been the argument that metaphors are a primarily conceptual construction and are in fact central to the development of thought.

In his words:

"Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature."
According to Lakoff, non-metaphorical thought is possible only when we talk about purely physical reality; the greater the level of abstraction, the more layers of metaphor are required to express it. People do not notice these metaphors for various reasons, including that some metaphors become 'dead' in the sense that we no longer recognize their origin. Another reason is that we just don't "see" what is "going on". — link

@j0e beautiful bouquet of passages. I really like the archipelago-vibe - a series of loosely connected passages - loose enough (like the resemblance between games) to allow fortuitous connections, but tight enough to have a discernible throughline.

I'm going to come in a little heavy-handed, and focus on one theme - hopefully I can add to that whole, while not unduly gravitizing one part.

Picking out one flower:

[T]he idea that the most basic linguistic know–how is not mastery of proprieties of use that can be expressed once and for all in a fixed set of rules, but the capacity to stay afloat and find and make one’s way on the surface of the raging white–water river of discursive communal practice that we always find ourselves having been thrown into (Wittgensteinian Geworfenheit) is itself a pragmatist insight. It is one that Dewey endorses and applauds. And it is a pragmatist thought that owes more to Hegel than it does to Kant. . — Brandom

(i)Brandom's 'raging white-water river' image is fantastic, and honestly (having read only a little of him) a nice surprise. He has felt dry to me in the past - this is a living, breathing, apt, image.

(ii) While I was reading the earlier posts, pre-Brandom - the posts with Wittgenstein talking about generality and the indigestive hunger for explanation, I kept thinking 'Hegel, this is Hegel.'

At first blush, tha's counter-intuitive because Hegel, in our collective imagination, is the arch-everything-has-its-specific-place guy - but if you read his Phenomenology, there is a long, insightful discussion of the connection between reason & explanation.

There is also an early discussion of 'mystery traditions' that leads him to the nothingness at the heart of revelation.If he means literally the mystery traditions, this is reductive and missing-the-point, but I don't think that's what he's about. I think he's foreshadowing something that comes into play more explicitly a bit later on. What do we get we get to the explanatory center?

Explanation is a human activity. It takes one level, x, the explanandum - and links it to another level, y, the explanans. in context, in the proper language games, this is a super useful tool! Science makes use of it all the time, and we have rockets and penicillin and VR etc. But when it's taken out of those contexts - when the indigestive hunger is looking to be satisfied - then (here's where Hegel really breaks it down) what is explanation? Metaphysically it can't satisfy. It can only link descriptions between different levels. Maybe you say x is the expression of y. Or maybe you say y causes x. But the indigestive, metaphysical, hunger expects]explanation to supply - offer the substantial heft - of the final satisfying thing - when all it can do - all its constructed to do - is establish linkages between levels.Wittgenstein breaks his spade to show the bedrock, and Hegel posits a 'inverted world' to show there's only so far you can go.

Just a digression from the main course of the posts, hopefully legible.

Great post! I wanted to get that out before composing a response.

(i)Brandom's 'raging white-water river' image is fantastic, and honestly (having read only a little of him) a nice surprise. He has felt dry to me in the past - this is a living, breathing, apt, image. — csalisbury

I've never owned one of his books, but I'm curious about A Spirit of Trust, which seems to be an assimilation of Hegel, finally, in the analytic tradition.

I adore the 'raging white-water river' metaphor. It was like something I was looking for without knowing it. This anti-theoretical and anti-philosophical notion of skill...I think Heidegger can be read as 'dasein is (primarily)skill.' Nice that we have a monosyllabic English word. Better than know-how in that words and deeds live together, no exact boundary between them.

Explanation is a human activity. It takes one level, x, the explanandum - and links it to another level, y, the explanans. in context, in the proper language games, this is a super useful tool! Science makes use of it all the time, and we have rockets and penicillin and VR etc. But when it's taken out of those contexts - when the indigestive hunger is looking to be satisfied - then (here's where Hegel really breaks it down) what is explanation? Metaphysically it can't satisfy. It can only link descriptions between different levels. Maybe you say x is the expression of y. Or maybe you say y causes x. But the indigestive, metaphysical, hunger expects]explanation to supply - offer the substantial heft - of the final satisfying thing - when all it can do - all its constructed to do - is establish linkages between levels.Wittgenstein breaks his spade to show the bedrock, and Hegel posits a 'inverted world' to show there's only so far you can go. — csalisbury

I really like this and agree. What is it that people hunger for? Some kind of impossible explanation of the whole deal, even though an explanation of the whole deal does not make sense, since explanation only links things intrasystematically. Long ago, before I really knew what I meant, I wrote 'Wittgenstein is the cube root of Hegel.' I went from Kojeve/Hegel to the TLP, favorite book of the moment to the next one and felt some kind of connection that I couldn't make explicit. You make me want to look into certain parts of Hegel's Phen. I have always only focused on certain passages and themes (most the types of people stuff.)

This anti-theoretical and anti-philosophical notion of skill...I think Heidegger can be read as 'dasein is (primarily)skill.' Nice that we have a monosyllabic English word. Better than know-how in that words and deeds live together, no exact boundary between them. — j0e

Yes! And the thing of skill or art or mastery is its not reducible - you know it when you see it, and if you loose all the accumulated scales-over-the-eyes of growing up, you can look back at childhood, go over memories, and see clearly (when you were a kid, witnessing grown-ups) who had it -for this, or for that - and who didn't. I think that test (if a child witnessed me doing this, or that now, what would they think?) is a primary one. Of course it's not all that - a kid might be impressed, even though you fuck up the pottery. But it's a good mental-jiggle to slot out of the fake stuff, and recalibrate with the real. Recognition among craftsmen is as important, but also if there's nothing in your life you can do that you can't explain and show to a child , delighting them- you're probably on the wrong path.

All a little digressive- but at the same time - skill, childhood, mastery - it all ties back into the 'I' and "we" from the beginning. (I add, because i can feel myself tending gravitationally, narrowing to a point, even though I'm talking about levitational things on my way to that gravitational narrowing) Up! The world we of skill we grow into and live within is always floating over some deep well/chasm you can't learn better by falling in.

Recognition among craftsmen is as important, but also if there's nothing in your life you can do that you can't explain and show to a child , delighting them- you're probably on the wrong path. — csalisbury

I like the introduction of the childhood theme. Think of adolescent concerns, being funny, dressing well, sports, cheerleading. All quite embodied, not compressible in a textbook.

Then there's a grown-up version that we're doing here with words (being funny, being cool, dressing well in words.) The whole 'logic is a gentleman's agreement' fits in here. I don't think there's a manual for being rational, being funny, being decent. Or rather we're all scribbling in a book that'll never be finished. Philosophy is something like the game of writing that book of rules, except (as Brandom/Hegel notes) we change the game as we comment on it. There's always a drift, often toward more complexity.

The world we of skill we grow into and live within is always floating over some deep well/chasm you can't learn better by falling in. — csalisbury

I'm with you on this floating metaphor. The ground is an abyss, an ocean whose bottom is lost in darkness. I'm not sure I'm reading the last part right. Are you saying that falling in does no good? That one has to (or might as well) float at a kind of distance? Or is there a word left out?

beautiful bouquet of passages. I really like the archipelago-vibe - a series of loosely connected passages - loose enough (like the resemblance between games) to allow fortuitous connections, but tight enough to have a discernible throughline. — csalisbury

Thanks for this too ! They all fit together for me. I just yanked out my favorites. I like the idea that we fill up the spaces between these fragments.

Seems to me that Witt is doing a kind of negative metaphysics. Philosophieren ist: falsche Argumente zurückweisen. We can trust our blind skill enough to be as far out (actually more far out) as the typical skeptic.

A mistaken cartoon of Witt and OLP is that he/it is desperately normal. There's wicked fun in solipsism and skepticism. It's bad boy stuff. And no one wants boring dad to call it all nonsense. But I don't think (and don't think dad thinks) it's nonsense. We can follow certain metaphors way out with sufficient concentration. 'Bad' metaphysics is proof of this, and it's not meaningless. Wherever 2 or 3 are gathered in my game.... And it's a game (or family of games) that players can get more skillful at. So it's a matter of prioritizing. Who are we to be?

Is the stubborn sceptic a bricked-in narcissist ? Fending off the reality ? Is there a comfort in an atomic theory of the self as a little island that can doubt away reality? castrate the father? But the sceptic can also be a anarchist, a freedom fight, keeping us open. I think W is a benevolent mutation of the skeptic.

The charm of a child lies to a great extent in his narcissism, his self-contentment and inaccessibility, just as does the charm of certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us, such as cats and the large beasts of prey. Indeed, even great criminals and humorists, as they are represented in literature, compel our interest by the narcissistic consistency with which they manage to keep away from their ego anything that would diminish it. It is as if we envied them for maintaining a blissful state of mind—an unassailable libidinal position which we ourselves have since abandoned.

The primary narcissism of children which we have assumed and which forms one of the postulates of our theories of the libido, is less easy to grasp by direct observation than to confirm by inference from elsewhere. If we look at the attitude of affectionate parents towards their children, we have to recognize that it is a revival and reproduction of their own narcissism, which they have long since abandoned. The trustworthy pointer constituted by overvaluation, which we have already recognized as a narcissistic stigma in the case of objectchoice, dominates, as we all know, their emotional attitude. Thus they are under a compulsion to ascribe every perfection to the child—which sober observation would find no occasion to do—and to conceal and forget all his shortcomings. (Incidentally, the denial of sexuality in children is connected with this.) Moreover, they are inclined to suspend in the child's favour the operation of all the cultural acquisitions which their own narcissism has been forced to respect, and to renew on his behalf the claims to privileges which were long ago given up by themselves. The child shall have a better time than his parents; he shall not be subject to the necessities which they have recognized as paramount in life. Illness, death, renunciation of enjoyment, restrictions on his own will, shall not touch him; the laws of nature and of society shall be abrogated in his favour; he shall once more really be the centre and core of creation—‘His Majesty the Baby’, as we once fancied ourselves. The child shall fulfil those wishful dreams of the parents which they never carried out—the boy shall become a great man and a hero in his father's place, and the girl shall marry a prince as a tardy compensation for her mother. At the most touchy point in the narcissistic system, the immortality of the ego, which is so hard pressed by reality, security is achieved by taking refuge in the child. Parental love, which is so moving and at bottom so childish, is nothing but the parents' narcissism born again, which, transformed into object-love, unmistakably reveals its former nature. — Freud

Not presenting Freud as an authority here but rather I'm yanking him into philosophy, listening to an old man who spent his life talking to people about their secrets and problems. Personally I think something like the 'ego ideal' is central to philosophy, because it's central to life. How do we see ourselves in relation to the tribe? What role does the philosopher specifically play? A crust-cutting rhetorical stuntman? A knowledge referee?

We have learnt that libidinal instinctual impulses undergo the vicissitude of pathogenic repression if they come into conflict with the subject's cultural and ethical ideas. By this we never mean that the individual in question has a merely intellectual knowledge of the existence of such ideas; we always mean that he recognizes them as a standard for himself and submits to the claims they make on him. Repression, we have said, proceeds from the ego; we might say with greater precision that it proceeds from the self-respect of the ego. The same impressions, experiences, impulses and desires that one man indulges or at least works over consciously will be rejected with the utmost indignation by another, or even stifled before they enter consciousness. The difference between the two, which contains the conditioning factor of repression, can easily be expressed in terms which enable it to be explained by the libido theory. We can say that the one man has set up an ideal in himself by which he measures his actual ego, while the other has formed no such ideal. For the ego the formation of an ideal would be the conditioning factor of repression. This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego. The subject's narcissism makes its appearance displaced on to this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of every perfection that is of value. As always where the libido is concerned, man has here again shown himself incapable of giving up a satisfaction he had once enjoyed. He is not willing to forgo the narcissistic perfection of his childhood; and when, as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgement, so that he can no longer retain that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal. — Freud

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_SE_On_Narcissism_complete.pdf

This Freud digression isn't obviously justified, but I like the question: who did Wittgenstein want to be? What kind of man? Or, more practically important, how can or how does philosophy make us better people? What are the ego-ideals operating in philosophy?

I suggest that the gentleman's agreement (logic) is an overlapping of ego ideals, a shared ego ideal, that of rationality, sanity, decency.

What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.
...
The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness.
...
What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it. — W

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein

Let's not forget:

Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice.
(Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness. — W

Work on philosophy -- like work in architecture in many respects -- is really more work on oneself. On one's own conception. On how one sees things. (And what one expects of them.) (CV, 24) — Wittgenstein

Seems to me that Witt is doing a kind of negative metaphysics. Philosophieren ist: falsche Argumente zurückweisen. — j0e

"Philosophy is: to reject false arguments -- Witt Big Typescript"

Insistent negative philosophy is a hallmark of W's analytic (analogous to Kant's 'critical') middle or transitional work. As discovered in David Stern's wonderful Wittgenstein on Mind and Language, (Intro available: academia.edu or google books)

By the time the PI was written, Witt had moved on to seeing that one is to understand a language one needs to be a player to be a participant in that particular language game.

None of us are in position to call other philosophies 'nonsense' until we understand what is sense in that philosophy. (I'm pointing at myself)

Witt had moved on to seeing that one is to understand a language one needs to be a player to be a participant in that particular language game. — magritte

:up: :up: :up:

None of us are in position to call other philosophies 'nonsense' until we understand what is sense in that philosophy. (I'm pointing at myself) — magritte

:up: :up: :up:

I think even the later Witt (in PI) is still swatting down prejudices about language that get in the way of our everyday knowhow or skill. It's as if a certain kind of philosopher is blinded by an alluring theory so that he forget his ordinary chops in the game.