:up:

In this post I'll try to link Wittgenstein to other thinkers.

Herder argues that human perception, thought, and action depend on language. And language, in his view, is fundamentally social:

Go into the age, into the clime, the whole history, feel yourself into everything—only now are you on the way towards understanding the word. (Herder 1774; also see Herder 1769 & 1772)

Like his predecessors, Herder argues that cultures possess characters, affecting how the cultures act overall, but in Herder’s view, historical explanation requires treating societies as unified entities, and regarding individuals as products of society.
...
To be a self, according to Hegel, involves self-consciousness. And this is not something that an individual can possess independently of others. Instead, self-consciousness depends on our having a sense of ourselves as individuals as distinct from others, which in turn depends on our interacting with other people (i.e., recognizing other people and being recognized by them)
...
Hegel’s universal spirit is sometimes used as an example of “ontological holism”—i.e., the claim that social entities are fundamental, independent, or autonomous entities, as opposed to being derived from individuals or non-social entities (Taylor 1975, Rosen 1984).
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As an alternative to ‘compact’ or ‘agreement,’ the legal theorist Samuel Pufendorf, in De Officio Hominis et Civis of 1673, uses the term ‘convention’ as the basis for law and language. He argues that conventions do not need be explicitly formed or agreed to. Instead, we can have tacit conventions—i.e., conventions that we may not even be aware we have.

Pufendorf also differs from his predecessors when it comes to what conventions accomplish. He does not merely speak of a convention as an agreement to cooperate or act in some way. Instead, by putting conventions in place, we create new features of the social world. For instance, Pufendorf holds that one kind of property ownership has its source in tacit convention. We have the tacit convention that the first person to occupy a piece of virgin soil becomes its owner. Without the convention, the first person to occupy a piece of virgin soil is no more than an occupant. The convention, however, generates new social institution: a form of ownership according to which being first occupant suffices to make a person an owner (De Officio, XII, 2). — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-ontology/history.html

Continuing as before to branch out from W to similar thinkers:

In Brandom’s view, it is Hegel who (in contrast to Kant) “brings things back to earth” by treating the transcendental structure of our “cognitive and practical doings” as being “functionally conferred on what, otherwise described, are the responses of merely natural creatures, by their role in inferentially articulated, implicitly normative social practices” .... Our practice of language-use is not merely the application of concepts but simultaneously the institution of the conceptual norms governing the correct use of our linguistic expressions; it is our actual use of language itself that settles the meanings of our expressions.
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Heidegger himself saw pragmatism as one element of the technologically oriented, scientistic and naturalistic philosophical tradition that was destroying our original relation to Being. However, Brandom – together with some other pragmatist interpreters– describes Heidegger’s basic project in Sein und Zeit as a pragmatist one of grounding Vorhandensein in Zuhandensein: a necessary (transcendental?) background for understanding how it is possible for us to judge, state, or represent how things are from a disinterested perspective is found in “our practical nonconceptual dealings with things”; thus, “knowing that” is to be explained in terms of “knowing how”, and the possibility of conceptually explicit contents is to be explained in terms of what is implicit in nonconceptual practices. Brandom explicitly regards Heidegger’s strategy for explaining how the vorhanden “rests on” the zuhanden as “pragmatism about the relation between practices or processes and objective representation”. He explicates this as “pragmatism concerning authority”: matters of (particularly epistemic) authority are matters of social practice, not simply objective factual matters; the distinctions between ontological categories such as Zuhandensein and Vorhandensein (and indeed Dasein itself) are social.Heidegger is also explained as maintaining a normative pragmatism (cf. section 2 above), in which norms implicit in practice are taken as primitive and explicit rules or principles are defined in terms of them.63 Brandom in effect takes Heidegger’s normative pragmatism to be the combination of two theses: (1) the factual is to be understood in terms of the normative; and (2) propositionally statable rules, explicit norms, are to be understood in terms of implicit norms, viz., “skillful practical discriminations of appropriate and inappropriate performances”. Social normativity, then, is irreducibly present in the very project of ontology. What is zuhanden, “ready-to-hand”, that is, “equipment”, is (Brandom notes) characterized by Heidegger himself as pragmata, “that which one has to do with in one’s concernful dealings”.65 Pragmatism, for Brandom’s Heidegger, is not simply semantic, conceptual, or normative, but also ontological:

Heidegger sees social behaviour as generating both the category of equipment ready-to-hand within a world, and the category of objectively present-at-hand things responded to as independent of the practical concerns of any community. In virtue of the social genesis of criterial authority (the self-adjudication of the social, given pragmatism about authority), fundamental ontology (the study of the origin and nature of the fundamental categories of things) is the study of the nature of social Being – social practices and practitioners.
— link

https://lenguajeyconocimiento.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/sobre-brandom.pdf

These things which are "independent of the practical concerns of any community" seems to me like points at infinity. We care about them, we appeal to them, we use them. But we use them because of their apparent, relative independence from our concerns. I think of a knife that doesn't lose its edge. Or it's the (supposedly or in-the-limit) part of our culture that transcends that culture, a part treated as universal. 'Even aliens will recognize the primes. '

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections -- the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field. Having re-evaluated one statement we must re-evaluate some others, whether they be statements logically connected with the first or whether they be the statements of logical connections themselves. But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.

If this view is right, it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement -- especially if it be a statement at all remote from the experiential periphery of the field. Furthermore it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements which hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle?

For vividness I have been speaking in terms of varying distances from a sensory periphery. Let me try now to clarify this notion without metaphor. Certain statements, though about physical objects and not sense experience, seem peculiarly germane to sense experience -- and in a selective way: some statements to some experiences, others to others. Such statements, especially germane to particular experiences, I picture as near the periphery. But in this relation of "germaneness" I envisage nothing more than a loose association reflecting the relative likelihood, in practice, of our choosing one statement rather than another for revision in the event of recalcitrant experience. For example, we can imagine recalcitrant experiences to which we would surely be inclined to accommodate our system by re-evaluating just the statement that there are brick houses on Elm Street, together with related statements on the same topic. We can imagine other recalcitrant experiences to which we would be inclined to accommodate our system by re-evaluating just the statement that there are no centaurs, along with kindred statements. A recalcitrant experience can, I have already urged, bc accommodated by any of various alternative re-evaluations in various alternative quarters of the total system; but, in the cases which we are now imagining, our natural tendency to disturb the total system as little as possible would lead us to focus our revisions upon these specific statements concerning brick houses or centaurs. These statements are felt, therefore, to have a sharper empirical reference than highly theoretical statements of physics or logic or ontology. The latter statements may be thought of as relatively centrally located within the total network, meaning merely that little preferential connection with any particular sense data obtrudes itself.

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries -- not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. Let me interject that for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. — Quine

http://fs2.american.edu/dfagel/www/Class%20Readings/Quine/TwoDogmasofEmpiricism.htm

This passage came to mind as I was thinking about controversial thinkers like Derrida and in general about accusations of meaninglessness. It might be that only a small group chatters in a certain lingo, yet this small group is part of the social system, and such ideas finally have an affect at the periphery.

One last post for the night, which I think addresses the 'relativism' of OC and 'form of life' in general.

Awareness of the historically effected character of understanding is, according to Gadamer, identical with an awareness of the hermeneutical situation and he also refers to that situation by means of the phenomenological concept of ‘horizon’ (Horizont)—understanding and interpretation thus always occurs from within a particular ‘horizon’ that is determined by our historically-determined situatedness. Understanding is not, however, imprisoned within the horizon of its situation—indeed, the horizon of understanding is neither static nor unchanging (it is, after all, always subject to the effects of history). Just as our prejudices are themselves brought into question in the process of understanding, so, in the encounter with another, is the horizon of our own understanding susceptible to change.

Gadamer views understanding as a matter of negotiation between oneself and one’s partner in the hermeneutical dialogue such that the process of understanding can be seen as a matter of coming to an ‘agreement’ about the matter at issue. Coming to such an agreement means establishing a common framework or ‘horizon’ and Gadamer thus takes understanding to be a process of the ‘fusion of horizons’ (Horizontverschmelzung). In phenomenology, the ‘horizon’ is, in general terms, that larger context of meaning in which any particular meaningful presentation is situated. Inasmuch as understanding is taken to involve a ‘fusion of horizons’, then so it always involves the formation of a new context of meaning that enables integration of what is otherwise unfamiliar, strange or anomalous. In this respect, all understanding involves a process of mediation and dialogue between what is familiar and what is alien in which neither remains unaffected. This process of horizonal engagement is an ongoing one that never achieves any final completion or complete elucidation—moreover, inasmuch as our own history and tradition is itself constitutive of our own hermeneutic situation as well as being itself constantly taken up in the process of understanding, so our historical and hermeneutic situation can never be made completely transparent to us. — link

I've bumped into John Wisdom for the first time in an anthology of analytic philosophy. Good stuff! Online texts are sparse, but...

The whole difficulty [in philosophy] arises like difficulty in a neurotic; the forces are conflicting but nearly equal. The philosopher remains in a state of confused tension unless he makes the [therapeutic] effort necessary to bring them all out by speaking of them and to make them fight it out by speaking of them together. It isn’t that people can’t resolve philosophical difficulties but that they won’t. In philosophy it is not a matter of making sure that one has got hold of the right theory but of making sure that one has got hold of them all. Like psychoanalysis it is not a matter of selecting from all our inclinations some which are right, but of bringing them all to light by mentioning them and in this process creating some which are right for this individual in these circumstances.
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… oscillation in deciding between philosophical doctrines goes hopelessly on until one gives up suppressing conflicting voices and lets them all speak their fill. Only then we can modify and reconcile them. — link

https://iep.utm.edu/wisdom/

I'll put this beside some W quotes.

Courage, not cleverness; not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree.

It is not by recognizing the want of courage in someone else that you acquire courage yourself..

You can't be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

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. — W

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

I think our common-sense selves know this. We see others trapped in loops, which makes us worry about whether we are trapped on our own little loops (and we probably always are.) Perhaps it's a matter of finding bigger and better loops to be trapped in, stretching the transparent bottle (now a soap bubble?) in which we fly.

the 'relativism' of OC and 'form of life' in general. — j0e

Name calling of 'relativism', being unfamiliar to simple-minded readers (that's everyone) has been the traditional way of spitting on the work of dead philosophers to strengthen one's pretense to divergent views. The Church, fearing dismissal or opposition to its dogma of absolute morality, has done much to cause relative morality and more simply the idea of relativism in general, to be both feared and hated. But with difficulties, logic and science has made small inroads into marshaled academia to the point where relativism is becoming progressive and even cool.

Does 'form of life' imply 'relativism'? Unfortunately, not quite.

... Gadamer views understanding as a matter of negotiation between oneself and one’s partner in the hermeneutical dialogue such that the process of understanding can be seen as a matter of coming to an ‘agreement’ about the matter at issue. ... This process of horizontal engagement is an ongoing one that never achieves any final completion or complete elucidation — Wittgenstein

If both 'partners' are in the same fly bottle then their hermeneutical dialogue can only be because of different understanding of the same language. This can be corrected or negotiated. This is dogmatism.

To get to semantic pluralism we need two fly bottles with flies of two different species speaking in at least some logically distinct terms. This sort of disagreement isn't logically open to correction or rapprochement. This is pluralism.

To get to relativism, one more giant logical (not semantic) step is needed. What does membership in each fly bottle depend on? In my example above, it's their species of flyhood.

Name calling of 'relativism' ... has been the traditional way of spitting on the work of dead philosophers — magritte

I call it one of the two basic ways, given that...

logic and science has made small inroads into marshaled academia to the point where relativism is becoming progressive and even cool. — magritte

The other way is calling X dogmatic, oppressive, etc.

Does 'form of life' imply 'relativism'? Unfortunately, not quite. — magritte

To me that's a tricky one.

A little more on relativism (indirectly) and what not...

Hegel discusses human culture as the “world of self-alienated spirit”. The idea seems to be that humans in society not only interact, but that they collectively create relatively enduring cultural products (repeatable stories, stageable dramas, and so forth) within which members of that society can recognise patterns of their own communal life as so reflected. We might find intelligible the metaphor that such products “hold up a mirror to society” within which “the society can regard itself”, without thinking we are thereby committed to some supra-individual unitary mind achieving self-consciousness. Furthermore, such cultural products themselves provide conditions allowing individuals to adopt particular cognitive attitudes by appropriating their resources. Thus, for example, the capacity to adopt the type of objective viewpoint demanded by Kantian morality (discussed in the final section of Spirit)—the capacity to see things, as it were, from a detached or universal point of view—might be enabled by engaging with spirit’s “alienations” such as the myths and rituals of a religion professing a universal scope. — SEP

I think we can include the inherited language itself as part of this 'self-alienated spirit,' as something like the ashes left behind by those who came before us. Or, we can reverse the metaphor. We are the candles and the 'spirit' (language at the basic level of 'cat' and 'dog' up to Hegelian metaphysics and beyond) is the flame that's passed from one to another. This prioritizes softwhere over hardwear, emphasizing us as profoundly social/cultural beings.

That's the set up. This is more to the point.

Revisionists, on the other hand, tend to see Hegel as furthering the Kantian critique into the very coherence of a conception of an in-itself reality that is beyond the limits of our theoretical (but not practical) cognition. Rather than understand absolute knowing as the achievement of some ultimate God’s-eye view of everything, the philosophical analogue to the connection with God sought in religion, post-Kantian revisionists see it as the accession to a mode of self-critical thought that has finally abandoned all non-questionable mythical givens, and which will only countenance reason-giving argument as justification. — SEP

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/

I see a connection to On Certainty here. 'Absolute knowledge' is the recognition of groundlessness, 'abandonment of the mythical givens' or unquestionable buck-stops-here foundations. The 'system' (the culture as a whole) can criticize itself but only in terms of the part of itself that it's taking for granted, which seems to apply to individuals as well, little microcosms of less complexity. 'Reason-giving argument' appeals to something, leans on something, starting perhaps with the intelligibility of its signs, enacting that trust by speaking up.

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction. — Nuerath

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurath%27s_boat

On the relativism issue, we can think of different cultures or just different individuals in the same culture trying to build some bridge-language between them. I doubt any two English speakers speak it exactly the same, so perhaps all communication involves 'bridge building' that's more or less difficult. Philosophers (good ones?) strive to sharpen the shared meaning space thru talking, hammering out some compromise in which all participants are recognized (ideally, if possible, which it's often not on a small scale.)

Herder seems relevant & perhaps close to W.

Herder began advancing three fundamental theses in this area:

Thought is essentially dependent on, and bounded in scope by, language—i.e., one can only think if one has a language, and one can only think what one can express linguistically.

Meanings or concepts are—not the sorts of things, in principle autonomous of language, with which much of the philosophical tradition has equated them, e.g., the referents involved (Augustine), Platonic forms, or subjective mental ideas à la Locke or Hume, but instead—usages of words.

Conceptualization is intimately bound up with (perceptual and affective) sensation. More precisely, Herder develops a quasi-empiricist theory of concepts that holds that sensation is the source and basis of all our concepts, but that we are able to achieve non-empirical concepts by means of metaphorical extensions from the empirical ones—so that all of our concepts ultimately depend on sensation in one way or another. — link

Pretty rad for 1764.

Herder’s theories of interpretation and translation both rest on a certain epoch-making insight of his: Whereas such eminent Enlightenment philosopher-historians as Hume and Voltaire had normally still held that, as Hume put it, “mankind are so much the same in all times and places that history informs us of nothing new or strange” (1748: section VIII, part I, 65), Herder discovered, or at least saw more clearly than anyone before him, that this was false, that peoples from different historical periods and cultures vary tremendously in their concepts, beliefs, values, (perceptual and affective) sensations, and so forth. He also recognized that similar, albeit usually less dramatic, variations occur even between individuals within a single period and culture.
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It is an implication of his thesis that all thought is essentially dependent on and bounded by language that an interpreted subject’s language is in a certain sense bound to be a reliable indicator of the nature of his thought, so that the interpreter at least need not worry that the interpreted subject might be entertaining ineffable thoughts or thoughts whose character is systematically distorted by his expression of them in language. It is an implication of Herder’s thesis that meaning consists in word-usage that interpretation essentially and fundamentally requires pinning down an interpreted subject’s word-usages, and thereby his meanings. Finally, it is an implication of Herder’s quasi-empiricist thesis concerning concepts that an interpreter’s understanding of an interpreted subject’s concepts must include some sort of recapturing of their basis in the interpreted subject’s sensations. — link

I think we can/should include feelings as part of or along with 'sensations.'

Herder proposes (prominently in This Too a Philosophy of History, for instance) that the way to bridge radical mental difference when interpreting is through Einfühlung, “feeling one’s way in”. This proposal has often been thought (for example, by Friedrich Meinecke) to mean that the interpreter should perform some sort of psychological self-projection onto texts. However, that is not Herder’s main idea here—for making it so would amount to advocating just the sort of distorting assimilation of the thought in a text to one’s own that he is above all concerned to avoid. As can be seen from This Too a Philosophy of History, what he mainly has in mind is instead an arduous process of historical-philological inquiry. .... (4) It also implies (This Too a Philosophy of History again shows) that hostility in an interpreter toward the people whom he interprets will generally distort his interpretation, and should therefore be avoided. (Herder is equally opposed to excessive identification with them for the same reason.) (5) Finally, it also implies that the interpreter should strive to develop his grasp of linguistic usage, contextual facts, and relevant sensations to the point where it achieves something like the same immediacy and automaticness that it had for a text’s original author and audience when they understood the text in light of such factors (so that it acquires for him, as it had for them, the phenomenology more of a feeling than a cognition).

In addition, Herder insists (for example, in the Critical Forests) on a principle of holism in interpretation. — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/herder/#PhilLangLangThouMean

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

Wittgenstein again very cleverly discovered the obviousity of the common wheel. You can't get out of your own mind obviously, whatever you study. This Wittgenstein was nothing but an incredibly clever observer, student, and bard of the blindingly obvious. It's just that he used language that made the worthless insights he mustered to master seem incredibly clever and deep. He was a loser, if you ask me, a worthless, two-penny thinker.

In a way he reminds me of Depak Chopra, inasmuch as both prove that humans are fooled by their own creation, language, and they value (involuntarily, or rather, inadvertently) glib over content.

Linguistic form has nothing to do with representation. What is at stake is the specific organization of a linguistic sequence operating upon its auditive materiality. For Saussure, this means something that is determined by the fact that we speak within a temporality which makes our words possible. Linguistic form is the grammar of linguistic temporality, words following each others, rhythms, repetitions, pauses; the gestalt of what we hear displayed through the dimension of time. In short, something comparable to music.

Wittgenstein's notion of language as a technique makes perfect sense in this context. We have a form related to a sign-technique that must be regarded as a process; starting, going on, ending, making discourses or poems. But this is only possible through the ear of the other. This does not only mean that a linguistic occurence is something understood by the other. It also means that it must be related to comparable occurences in such a way that this relationship makes what we call a word something essentially repeated. A linguistic item in a sequence is a linguistic item if it can be repeated in other sequences. This is essentially because the existence of – let us say a word – is a relational existence in the sense that it gets its identity from the web of linguistic sequences and from its repetitions within them. This means that what is repeated is not an indentity – the same word. Every speaker says a word in slightly different ways and this implies that we have only variations and nothing but variation. Therefore, it is the variations that make the identity of a word and not an invariant or constant that the variations are supposed to manifest in the indvidual speech. To use Wittgenstein's term we can say that the variations hold family-resemblances to each other. The links between them are – so to say horizontal and comparative which means that these links are not explained by an identity on another level. Instead we have relations between variations – lines of variations. And this makes up the form of a language – the form being the systematicity of the variations. If we accept this, there is no essential difference between the individuality of my phrase the fact that I'm saying it – and the fact that it is understood by the other. For the individuation of what makes the words in what I say is at the same time the relations – the form – that makes us hear it as a linguistic sequence: The individualization of my utterance is at the same time what gives it its linguistic identity. Differences and variations are not parasitic to a language, do not threaten language. On the contrary, it is just what makes language possible. To say the opposite, would presuppose a code or an invariant which can explain variants and so called deviations; a standard or a normal language. But this is a political entity, not a linguistic entity. As Saussure has stressed, a language in this sense is a construction; there are only dialects and variations between dialects.

According to this point of view, a language cannot but change. Change and thereby history is not something external to it. A language cannot but be spoken in different ways and that means that it will also change because here there is no identity that is repeated or presupposed. This means, that with respect to language a form or a system cannot but change. But this change is a change without origin and without finality. The traditional opposition between system and history can therefore only be dissolved if we give up the metaphysics of history on the one hand and the metaphysics of the system on the other (the system being an universal atemporal order). This means that grammar is arbitrary – a grammar does change, but it does'nt have to change in a definite direction. Chance and order are two sides of the same coin. So the patterns of our language change, otherwise there would have been no language or a created artificial language. And they change because our words are not things and not something that can copy a model of some super-linguistic kind. But the word is not a nothing either; it consists in those auditive differences and variations forming the patterns of our language.

It is essential for such a pattern to be linked to time – time being just what makes a linguistic sequence possible. If you still beleive in a referent making the word what it is, this might be difficult to see. What is, then, the pattern of such a time-sequence? It is not causal in the sense that a word is an effect of the word preceeding it. It is not intentional in being linked to an intention in the speaking subject. It is not logical in the sense of giving the form of an inference. What we have is what I have tried to speak about – difficult as it is – grammatical or linguistic form. But here I cannot give you a clear-cut theory or a method that can formalize what I have called "form in language". Maybe such a form can only be shown in the use of language and that those who try to formalize it are trying to write down what can only be shown in what we say. So let me say the last sentence that I wrote in my abstract: What we hear we cannot write about in the same manner as we hear it. — Utaker

http://wab.uib.no/agora/tools/wab/collection-2-issue-1-article-8.annotate

A couple comments. For Saussure there's the sigifier (the 'sound image') and the signified (concept). I find it fascinating that the sound image is ideal. As Utaker says, we don't say the 'same' word in the same way. Even a single individual never pronounces the 'same' word the same way twice. But we do have in written language the same word ('cat' is 'cat' is 'cat') which of course will differ in its meaning effect in different contexts. Perhaps we use 'cat' to name what we conceive of as an equivalence class, which should be thought of here as having no center, no prototype.

Utaker doesn't come out and say it, but I think he dances around one of my favorite ideas, which is something like: living words are 'all surface.' Wee donut meow what we are barking about. We trade signs as if they encoded a meaning or plaintext that for us is infinitely intimate. 'You hear only the code that I am forced to use, but I gaze on pure 'intention' or crystalline meaning-stuff.' In other words, the speaker is supposed (under normal or at least ideal conditions) to understand exactly what he means. Perhaps we find this plausible because we can usually offer a replacement expression that does the same-enough job. 'It's raining.' 'Little drops of water are falling from the sky.' Clearly 'meaning' is a useful as a word here. Those sentences (roughly) have the same 'meaning.' But some are tempted to leap from this useful equivalence class (as something like a meaning) to a mysterious something that both sentences encode.

Let's call this a mostly tacit default ontology. Because it's tacit, we don't think to examine it. It's obvious in some vague way that there's this stuff called meaning, as if meaning were a musical score and the speech act a performance (so we say, trapped by a picture, a metaphor.)
This is like thinking that 1/2 and 4/8 both encode the same inexpressible something, simply because they are in the same equivalence class. To be sure, language is messier than Q, and 'equivalence class' is already an imperfect metaphor when applied to it, tho I do think it's one rung up at least from 'hidden essence.'

I'm thinking in terms of a 'meaningful materiality' that can only falsely (if conveniently) be split into an arbitrary token/signifier and a concept/signified This is not my idea. It's already in Saussure. The image is two sides of the same page or two faces of the same coin. A useful lie?

Wittgenstein again very cleverly discovered the obviousity of the common wheel. — god must be atheist

The common wheel took a genius to discover, some cultures never did. To dig under what ought to be obvious but isn't is one important purpose of philosophy. What more would you expect?
http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/perloff/witt_intro.html

This is an old but good point that may inspire some comments.

...if you don’t know English, and want to know what a cow is, you would have to look up “cow” in the dictionary. But under the entry “cow,” instead of finding a meaning that would satisfy your search for a meaning, since you don’t know English, you would only find a bunch of other sounds: Cow, The mature female of domestic cattle, or of other animals, as the whale, elephant, etc.

But in order to know the meaning of the sounds “cattle”, “whale”, and “elephant”, you would have to look up their meanings, their signifieds, but you would find only more lists of signifiers, more sounds! A whale is a large mammal that lives in the sea, but then what is a mammal, what is a sea….? ... Because every potential meaning turns out to be just another sound, searching for yet another potential meaning, one never reaches meaning—there is only an endless chain of sounds. — link

https://newderrida.wordpress.com/category/derrida-and-saussure/

This simple point gestures toward the 'abyss' that this system of ('meaningful') sounds 'hovers' over. It makes sense to me to think of a (vague) 'core' of the language, which we might call a 'soft' foundation.

The movement from one word to another in search of a final meaning can be thought of in terms of being put off, delayed, deferred. There's an analogous delay as we read a sentence and wait for its meaning to come into focus before its period. Saussure saw that speech is 'linear' (one sound after another in a chain) and 'in' time. I think of Kant's 'Time is the a priori formal condition of all appearances in general.' Or Eliot's " Words move, music moves / Only in time ." We might say 'consciousness is time,' ignoring what's still wrong in that. (As far as I can tell, it's all wrong. I mean it's all just blowing the horn about blowing the horn and striving hopelessly but fascinated against the limits of this instrument. )

In-the-way, the music of our mouthhorn (our foolosophical saxofoam) is 'meaningful' or has a 'dimension' that the saxophone doesn't. This metaphorical extra dimension seems to be (most importantly anyway) metaphor itself ('analogy as the core of cognition.')

Pardon the miss.

To dig under what ought to be obvious but isn't is one important purpose of philosophy. — magritte

:up:
It's not so easy to take off glasses we don't know we are wearing. Gotta thank those who point it out. Ever seen Pleasantville? An optimistic reading is that philosophers are seeing in more colors than us, because we are stuck in B&W glasses we don't know we can take off, because we don't know we have them on the first place. (The contingent is mistaken for the necessary...or there's just knowledge too close, too tacit, to touch. Till they do. Then we can.)

The common wheel took a genius to discover, some cultures never did. To dig under what ought to be obvious but isn't is one important purpose of philosophy. What more would you expect? — magritte

Yes, the invention was genius. Or an accident. Either way.

But to rename the wheel, after it had been invented thousands of years ago, and has been in constant use, and to explain how it works in language that reveals nothing new about the wheel, and yet it sounds creative; and to take credit for the explanation requires no genius. It is genius to explain the obvious that has not been explained before; but to explain the known obvious in different terms adding nothing new, and for which people worship the explainer, is not very ingenious -- neither on the part of the explainer, nor on the part of those who think the explainer is a genius.

I think we shouldn't spend too much time on the wheel analogy. So far you have made only very general comments about Wittgenstein that could be aimed at pretty much anyone.


Descartes again very cleverly discovered the obviousity of the common wheel. You can't get out of your own mind obviously, whatever you study. This Descartes was nothing but an incredibly clever observer, student, and bard of the blindingly obvious. It's just that he used language that made the worthless insights he mustered to master seem incredibly clever and deep. He was a loser, if you ask me, a worthless, two-penny thinker.

Hume again very cleverly discovered the obviousity of the common wheel. You can't get out of your own mind obviously, whatever you study. This Hume was nothing but an incredibly clever observer, student, and bard of the blindingly obvious. It's just that he used language that made the worthless insights he mustered to master seem incredibly clever and deep. He was a loser, if you ask me, a worthless, two-penny thinker.

Kant again very cleverly discovered the obviousity of the common wheel. You can't get out of your own mind obviously, whatever you study. This Kant was nothing but an incredibly clever observer, student, and bard of the blindingly obvious. It's just that he used language that made the worthless insights he mustered to master seem incredibly clever and deep. He was a loser, if you ask me, a worthless, two-penny thinker.

Hegel again very cleverly discovered the obviousity of the common wheel. You can't get out of your own mind obviously, whatever you study. This Hegel was nothing but an incredibly clever observer, student, and bard of the blindingly obvious. It's just that he used language that made the worthless insights he mustered to master seem incredibly clever and deep. He was a loser, if you ask me, a worthless, two-penny thinker.


Can you provide some more insight about Wittgenstein that suggests some familiarity with his work? Would you mind summarizing him (a challenge, I know)?

One of the noteworthy charms of Wittgenstein's work is that he gets us out of the methodological solipsism that runs from Descartes to Hegel. Actually Hegel does too on some interpretations, but Wittgenstein does it without any systematic baggage. In some ways his work is a set of counterexamples, evidence against various systems and perhaps the possibility of a crystalline system.

So far you have made only very general comments about Wittgenstein that could be aimed at pretty much anyone. — j0e

No. My opinion of Wittgenstein could not be aimed at pretty much anyone. This is a complete misrepresentation of what I am saying, and a complete misinformative dismissal of it.

What I am saying about Wittgenstein IS very pertinent, and it is very pointed aimed at Wittgenstein and at Wittgenstein only.

What I am saying about Wittgenstein IS very pertinent, and it is very pointed aimed at Wittgenstein and at Wittgenstein only. — god must be atheist

I believe you, but I don't think you made a case. As I see it, most people don't find Wittgenstein's points obvious. You called him a 'worthless two penny' thinker...which seems to imply that all the scholars of his work are misguided one penny thinkers. That comes off as arrogant.

The only kind of criticism that seems worth taking seriously is serious criticism, engagement with the details. I think we should give intellectual 'heroes' hell. Reputation doesn't earn a free pass.

As I see it, most people don't find Wittgenstein's points obvious. — j0e

I am reeling in the bewilderment how they can miss that in any and all of W's utterances.

The only kind of criticism that seems worth taking seriously is serious criticism, engagement with the details. — j0e

This is absolutely agreeable. I ask you to give me any of Wittgenstein's quotes, and I show you how my GENERAL opinion of his utterances applies.

I admit I only know Wittgenstein's teachings in the scope of what is quoted and attributed to him ON THIS FORUM. I never read him. I can't read text, that is my folly. It is a developmental inadequacy and disaster that I can't read. I got my undergrad degree by listening to lectures in class, without ever opening a textbook. I never even took notes. I just listened. I did not get good grades, I think my grade point average amounted to a C+, whatever that is in numbers (I think 65-69 percent out of 100) over the four years of my course of study. But then again, if I were able to read, my life would be completely different from what it is now.

I never read him. I can't read text, that is my folly. — god must be atheist

That's a tough situation. I'm sorry you've had to deal with it. I appreciate your honesty.

I ask you to give me any of Wittgenstein's quotes, and I show you how my GENERAL opinion of his utterances applies. — god must be atheist

This is a good one. It touches on some of the stuff I'm focusing on in the Saussure thread. I think Wittgenstein is looking at 'social facts.'

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. — W

...if you don’t know English, and want to know what a cow is, you would have to look up “cow” in the dictionary. But under the entry “cow,” instead of finding a meaning that would satisfy your search for a meaning, since you don’t know English, you would only find a bunch of other sounds: Cow, The mature female of domestic cattle, or of other animals, as the whale, elephant, etc.

But in order to know the meaning of the sounds “cattle”, “whale”, and “elephant”, you would have to look up their meanings, their signifieds, but you would find only more lists of signifiers, more sounds! A whale is a large mammal that lives in the sea, but then what is a mammal, what is a sea….? ... Because every potential meaning turns out to be just another sound, searching for yet another potential meaning, one never reaches meaning — link

I hope this is a quote by Wittgenstein. (W.)

1. He uses the obvious concept that words are part of a language.
2. He uses the obvious concept that meaning can be explained.
3. He uses the obvious concept that meaning can't be explained to a person in a language which the particular person has no knowledge in, whatsoever -- not even knowledge of the meaning of just one wrod.
4. He concludes that knowledge of a language can't be obtained by a person who has no knowledge of meaning of any words in the language.
5. He introduces the concept and names it "signifieds" to empower his worthless discovery be able to make people to swoon over W's intellect and "insight".
6. He finishes by another blindingly obvious (and wrong) conclusion that meaning is just a different sound.

This argument and its conclusion is based on a number of incredibly obvious details, such as discovering that each word that is different from others, is different from others. He fails to realize that there is a primary understanding one needs to apply to language, and which language applies to the person who understands it, and that is that a direct relationship exists between, say, a camel and and the word "camel". He ignores this fact very conveniently, and because of this, he sounds like a genius. He sounds as if he made a proof that language in and by itself is meaningless, because if you don't know the meaning ab ovo of the components of a language, it can't be made to make sense. That is true if and only if entry or bridging between the components of the language and associated meaning is denied. Which is not denied. Hence, he is an idiot, by claiming the obvious as an insight, that lacking the connection of meaning to words and/or to other components of a language makes the language meaningless.

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. — W

W simply can't get over the hurdle that language is a symbolic representation of thought, which is a complex system of experiences linked to symbolic expressions of the experience. To W it is a an "occult" or supernatural, and at any rate miraculous could one say? event that words have meanings. He again expresses his pet theory in the passage you quoted, that he sees scribbles, and he can't understand how scribbles can mean anything to anyone without the scribbles given special meaning. He then proceeds that meaning to scribbles is given by adding other scribbles. HE COMPLETELY MISSES that there is a bridge there somewhere, that connects scribbles, in one form of another, to experience of a sentient being. He is stuck in the mud with his scribbles, scratching his head, how they can have meaning. And he massages his own un-understanding in such formative detail, in such refined language and bringing up such sophisticated associations, that his basic message, stupidity, does not get through to most readers. His basic stupidity lies, as mentioned, in the inadequacy to see that language is symbolic, human language is, and there has to be some sort of primary association between expressions of the symbolic language, and experience.

You will find it in any of his writings, this naivite, this bewildered incredulity of his not understanding how a symbolic language can have meaning. In fact, I yet have to see a lecture segment, or else any topic of discussion by W, that deals with a different subject.

That's not a quote from Witt. I quote lots of other folks too when I talk about a thinker, reeling in what seems illuminating.

But let's talk about your talk about it.

He fails to realize that there is a primary understanding one needs to apply to language, and which language applies to the person who understands it, and that is that a direct relationship exists between, say, a camel and and the word "camel". — god must be atheist

For the most part, language is not a nomenclature. I don't deny that 'camel' can summon up the image of a camel (in some vague sense), but as the beetle-in-the-box argument shows, what happens in the individual mind is useless where the study of social facts and public meaning are concerned.

"When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires."

These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names.——In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands. Augustine does not speak of there being any difference between kinds of word.If you describe the learning of language in this way you are, I believe, thinking primarily of nouns like "table", "chair", "bread", and of people's names, and only secondarily of the names of certain actions and properties; and of the remaining kinds of word as something that will take care of itself.

That philosophical concept of meaning has its place in a primitive idea of the way language functions. But one can also say that it is the idea of a language more primitive than ours. Let us imagine a language for which the description given by Augustine is right. The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with buildingstones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words "block", "pillar", "slab", "beam". A calls them out;—B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.——Conceive this as a complete primitive language. 3. Augustine, we might say, does describe a system of communication; only not everything that we call language is this system. And one has to say this in many cases where the question arises "Is this an appropriate description or not?" The answer is: "Yes, it is appropriate, but only for this narrowly circumscribed region, not for the whole of what you were claiming to describe." It is as if someone were to say: "A game consists in moving objects about on a surface according to certain rules . . ."—and we replied: You seem to be thinking of board games, but there are others. You can make your definition correct by expressly restricting it to those games. 4. Imagine a script in which the letters were used to stand for sounds, and also as signs of emphasis and punctuation. (A script can be conceived as a language for describing sound-patterns.)

Now imagine someone interpreting that script as if there were simply a correspondence of letters to sounds and as if the letters had not also completely different functions. Augustine's conception of language is like such an over-simple conception of the script.. If we look at the example in §i, we may perhaps get an inkling how much this general notion of the meaning of a word surrounds the working of language with a haze which makes clear vision impossible. — Witt

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

He finishes by another blindingly obvious (and wrong) conclusion that meaning is just a different sound. — god must be atheist

I think the correct way to go here is not the reduction of meaning to sound but the recognition that meaningful sound is systematic, that meaning is (primarily) in the differences in the sounds and the different ways that such sounds are used in our lives. Very roughly...meaning is use is a social fact. It's not 'in here' but 'out there.' (Yes we have something like consciousness and feeling but these can't play the role that we think they can. They are private & ineffable by definition. As Ryle notes, they lead to epistemic apocalypse.)

He then proceeds that meaning to scribbles is given by adding other scribbles. HE COMPLETELY MISSES that there is a bridge there somewhere, that connects scribbles, in one form of another, to experience of a sentient being. He is stuck in the mud with his scribbles, scratching his head, how they can have meaning. And he massages his own un-understanding in such formative detail, in such refined language and bringing up such sophisticated associations, that his basic message, stupidity, does not get through to most readers. His basic stupidity lies, as mentioned, in the inadequacy to see that language is symbolic, human language is, and there has to be some sort of primary association between expressions of the symbolic language, and experience. — god must be atheist

From my POV, you are completely missing the point that Wittgenstein is pointing out how mistaken that admittedly intuitive-automatic view is.

If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means - must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?

Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! --Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. --Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. --But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant. — W

It's cool that you disagree with him. I think Wittgenstein is offensive to common sense, because he challenges it. He's revolutionary because so many philosophers just accept this 'common sense' and try to build on it, only to get their wheels stuck in the same mud.Your objections seem to be based on the intuition that meaning is 'really' in the private consciousness. You take what I'd call a methodological solipsism for granted. You inherit this Cartesian baggage as a truth, when it's only a useful but misleading fiction.

Note that you seemed to have switched from Wittgenstein is obviously right and boring to Wittgenstein is obviously wrong and stupid. Isn't that noteworthy?

Dear @J0e, I totally agree with you in interpreting what a language is, and what it does. It is said that language is purely a product of society, not of the individual; language would be impossible to create without sentient individuals living in a social setting.

I totally agree.

I am adamant, however, that Wittgenstein has ever had the insight of seeing how symbolic language relates to reality. He is stuck in the representation of language, and he makes a bridge between representation of language and language, but he fails to see the bridge between language (or its representation) and meaning.

In fact, all his quotes I've ever seen by him deal with this issue.

He is focussed on one single solitary insight, a false and limping one, and he expounds on it ad infinitum.

------------------

More quotes by Wittgenstein that you can supply to me on this forum, about the same length each that you already have, will be a nice challenge for me to show you that what I say here actually sticks.

but he fails to see the bridge between language (or its representation) and meaning. — god must be atheist

He sees that bridge and blows it up. Consider that 'I' or 'ego' itself is caught up in the play of signs. He's not saying that signs are meaningless. He's showing us that we've been looking for the 'life' of the signs in the wrong place.

I will look for some good quotes for you to tackle.

I think Wittgenstein is offensive to common sense, because he challenges it. — j0e

I beg to differ, but that's already known, so why keep stating the obvious over and over again, eh? If I say "Humans are all atomic bombs shaped like a six-sided dice", that also challenges common sense, and is stupid. Your and my opinions about Wittgenstein's utterances has only one difference from mine, which is an interpretive difference: I see them as stupid, worthless and useless, and you see the same thing as works of a genius, valuable and making sense.

We, you and I, are trying to iron out the differences between these two interpretive opinions.

This can only be done by studying in detail the utterances of Wittgenstein.

I can only devote a finite amount of time to this, I am sorry.

Here's another good one.

"What would it be like if human beings shewed no outward signs of pain (did not groan, grimace, etc.)? Then it would be impossible to teach a child the use of the word 'tooth-ache'."—Well, let's assume the child is a genius and itself invents a name for the sensation! —But then, of course, he couldn't make himself understood when he used the word.—So does he understand the name, without being able to explain its meaning to anyone?—But what does it mean to say that he has 'named his pain'?—How has he done this naming of pain?! And whatever he did, what was its purpose?—When one says "He gave a name to his sensation" one forgets that a great deal of stagesetting in the language is presupposed if the mere act of naming is to make sense. And when we speak of someone's having given a name to pain, what is presupposed is the existence of the grammar of the word "pain"; it shews the post where the new word is stationed. 258. Let us imagine the following case. I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation. To this end I associate it with the sign "S" and write this sign in a calendar for every day on which I have the sensation.——I will remark first of all that a definition of the sign cannot be formulated.—But still I can give myself a kind of ostensive definition.—How? Can I point to the sensation? Not in the ordinary sense. But I speak, or write the sign down, and at the same time I concentrate my attention on the sensation—and so, as it were, point to it inwardly.—But what is this ceremony for? for that is all it seems to be! A definition surely serves to establish the meaning of a sign.—Well, that is done precisely by the concentrating of my attention; for in this way I impress on myself the connexion between the sign and the sensation.—But "I impress it on myself" can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the connexion right in the future. But in the present case I have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can't talk about 'right'. Are the rules of the private language impressions of rules?— The balance on which impressions are weighed is not the impression of a balance.. "Well, I believe that this is the sensation S again."
...
What reason have we for calling "S" the sign for a sensation? For "sensation" is a word of our common language, not of one intelligible to me alone. So the use of this word stands in need of a justification which everybody understands.—And it would not help either to say that it need not be a sensation; that when he writes "S", he has something—and that is all that can be said. "Has" and "something" also belong to our common language.—So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.—But such a sound is an expression only as it occurs in a particular language-game, which should now be described. — PI

From my POV, you are completely missing the point that Wittgenstein is pointing out how mistaken that admittedly intuitive-automatic view is. — j0e

This is your point of view. However, I don't see it justified by only reading the quote by Wittgenstein (W). He makes no allusion whatsoever to what you call your point of view here. Your interpretation is not spelled out, and not alluded to by W, in the quote. Either the quote is truncated, or else your POV is not a part of it; your POV may not be a part of any of the writings of W. I must ask you to please supply the reference that makes your POV valid, and that reference what I am looking for is essentially W stating the same as you have here.

I think your interpretation, or POV, is fantasy. I say that because I LACK in seeing any supportive evidence of it. I somehow sense that your POV is a validation of your opinion of W's views; there may be evidence of it, and I wish to see it if it exists, but until then I consider your POV a rationale, a rationalization of a cognitive dissonance between an opinion that W is an idiot, and that he can't be an idiot, due to emotional devotion to his imagined genius.

Once you can supply the evidence that your POV is valid, I will consider it.