If I understand @StreetlightX, his contention is that a language-game is analogous to a chess game, i.e., you're either playing chess or not. To say you're playing chess, when you're making the wrong moves, is not chess. It's not that you're playing chess incorrectly, you're not playing chess at all. My contention is that there are incorrect moves in the game of chess, so if you move the rook diagonally, then you're not playing chess correctly. If you're teaching the game of chess, then it seems obvious that there are correct and incorrect moves based on the rules. I think it can be looked both ways, but maybe @StreetlightX is giving a more nuanced interpretation.

The temptation is to think of language games as discreet, and hence in terms of explicit rules. A few things mitigate against this. — Banno

I'm not sure I follow your point in terms of what I was saying. It seems that the rule and the use go hand-in-hand. The pawn in chess would would be quite useless without the rule, or a rule that governs its moves. So too, it seems in language-games, the grammatical rules (implicit or explicit) govern how we use the words, or in chess how we move the pieces (correctly or incorrectly).

Yes, I agree. Making invalid moves and yet believing, or assuming, you are still playing a particular game when you are not any longer is what I think Witty suggests is incorrect usage. It's the 'misrecognition of a invalid move as a valid move' reinforced by not being identified as such (critically or practically) that allows one to 'persist with incorrect usage'.

Excellent juxtaposition!

And neither @Sam26 nor @StreetlightX is wrong.

En passant was not always a move is chess. It was once possible to move the King like a knight, once. - the "King's leap".

We add and subtract from the rules. that's part of family resemblance.

But let's remember the vervet monkeys. They are bodies in a world together — hanaH

Great. See if you can sign one up to the Forum.

@Wayfarer

I'm happy to talk more if you decide to be serious again.

the grammatical rules (implicit or explicit) govern how we use the words, or in chess how we move the pieces (correctly or incorrectly). — Sam26

§201 ...Hence there is an inclination to say: every action according to the rule is an interpretation. But we ought to restrict the term "interpretation" to the substitution of one expression of the rule for another.
§202 And hence also "obey a rule" is a practice.

§217 ...If I have exhausted the justification I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say :'This is simply what I do."

...that is, to obey a rule is to act; but the act governs the rule.

I've always been a bit, a whole lot actually, bothered by what is correct usage of words. This is basically the idea that a word has a fixed referent and while context/the language game matter, given a particular context/language game, a word has a referent that should remain constant.

Consider now Wittgenstein's private language argument. He deems such an impossibility because it would be incoherent. It's not clear what he meant by that but the received wisdom seems to be that correct usage becomes meaningless as the sign/word - referent association breaks down and becomes chaotic, too chaotic to be understood hence, incoherence.

This suggests, to me at least, that Wittgenstein subscribes to the sign-referent theory of meaning or some variation of it. If not, his private language argument is nonsensical (correct usage).

Come now to Wittgenstein's meaning is use concept. Words can be used for anything that we can do with them seems to be the takeaway. There is no essence (to a word) holding us back. Basically, correct usage is meaningless or N/A.

What up with that? — TheMadFool

Here's my take on what you're wondering about:

The correct use of words is a matter of convention which may change over time.

The only sense I can make of the PLA is that for any private language, its non-ostensive words, at least, would have to be translated into a public language you are familiar with in order to know what they mean or refer to. For example say your private language has a word for love; how could you know what the word meant if you didn't say it means the same as 'love'? I mean you'd have to be thinking of love in the first place to have invented the alternative word, no?

Some people claim that non-ostensive words don't refer. I think this is incorrect. 'Love' refers to love. We all have an idea what love is, but we needed familiarity with a public language in order to have that idea in any reflective, abstract sense.

Meaning is not use, strictly speaking, but use indicates meaning. If I were to use a word in an eccentric way to refer to something other than its conventional referent or referents, then my use would indicate the alternative meaning I have assigned to the word.

In dropping talk of meaning in favour of talk about use, we demote stating rules in favour of enacting them.

In what ways other than reference is language meaningful? Even if there's an answer to that question, of what relevance do they have to philosophy? — TheMadFool

Thinking, believing, understanding, pointing, excusing, deducing, etc., etc. All the various concepts and activities of our lives have different conditions (criteria) and possibilities than reference or correspondence (and embody different interests and judgments of our culture in different ways). This is the main point of the PI (that everything is meaningful in its own way).

You are restricting what you call philosophy to something analogous to a statement being true or false (essence as something singular and certain), when, for example, Austin has shown that there are statements that have the value of being true without the same criteria and mechanism as true/false (that some statements accomplish something (or fail to) in the saying of them).

How would we go about living lives if, for instance, we don't know the essence of poisons and their antidotes? How do we recognize water if we ignore the essence of what water is? — TheMadFool

These are only examples of physical objects which are able to meet the criteria of certainty and predictable outcomes (which was the standard required by traditional philosophy for everything). But just because not everything submits to the scientific method, does not mean we are abandoning truth, necessity, and what is essential to something being what it is.

Surely, something's not quite right with Wittgenstein and his acolytes if they're, as you seem to be claiming, moving away from essences to merely, quite obviously, playing with words. — TheMadFool

The rigid requirement of certainty makes any other criteria seem irrational or arbitrary. Wittgenstein is talking about understanding things in the same spirit that Plato sought, just without the same metaphysical picture. Words and the world are not separate in the way you imagine and so in trivializing language you cut off the ability to look into what is essential about the world. (When philosophy could not maintain certainty and universality it separated appearance from the world in order to keep the world pure. It does the same kind of thing with language and the world.)

1. Meaning is use [words lack an essence]. — TheMadFool

Meaning is not a thing (and “use” is not a substitute), but our concepts still embody what is essential about a thing through its criteria, conditions, and possibilities.

2. Language games [Form of life determines meaning (use)]. — TheMadFool

A "form" of life is not a referent nor a basis for meaning but just a picture to introduce the idea of different categories (like: an apology, duty, responsibility) and the ordinary criteria of each.

3. Family resemblance [Illusion of essence]. — TheMadFool

Again, family resemblance is not a negation of what is essential, but only to say that a concept may have multiple senses (uses), possibilities, which we come at in the context from different interests. A table is essentially a flat surface with four legs, but, from a different angle, anywhere at which we eat dinner. What is essential will depend on the context and our attention to the criteria that reflect our interests, though, of course, not everything meets the criteria of what we would identify as a table.

4. Private language [Incoherent for many reasons]. — TheMadFool

This section is not an argument (for a conclusion) but to show the difference between what is personal and the mental process we picture that to be (a thought, intention).

Meaning is not use, strictly speaking, but use indicates meaning. If I were to use a word in an eccentric way to refer to something other than its conventional referent or referents, then my use would indicate the alternative meaning I have assigned to the word. — Janus

I get what you are saying, but I think it's problematic to call some personally assigned referent an "alternative meaning." This is because it's best to think about "meaning" being something like the system of behavior and worldly entities that includes spoken or written words. The "meaning" of a stop sign is (something like) the fact that people stop at it most of the time. If there is a private mental accompaniment to that stopping, so be it, but it's not important.

(I've been suggesting that talk of referents is, in general, more misleading than helpful. Better, in rational discussions, to say with what is public.)

In dropping talk of meaning in favour of talk about use, we demote stating rules in favour of enacting them. — Banno

:up:

Perhaps it's human vanity that prevents us from simply looking at social animals and seeing how their signals allow them to coordinate their behavior and therefore get fed or avoid becoming food, which is to say survive.

We might also consider how we humans survive, just like the other animals, by coordinating our efforts via words and other "low cost" signifying actions to wring out a living from our environment. (By "low cost" I mean it doesn't take many calories to give the location of a resource or a threat. It makes sense that something "cheap" like tongue-shaping air or wiggling the fingers would serve such a purpose.)

that is, to obey a rule is to act; but the act governs the rule. — Banno

Ya, I see what you're saying. That's probably a better way to say it.

I'm happy to talk more if you decide to be serious again. — hanaH

You're the one who introduced animal communications into the conversation, as if that were meaningful in respect of the nature of language and conceptual thought. Now you're appealing to 'survival' as if that is a criteria of what is true. As if the only criteria you have for deciding 'what is true' is 'what contributes to survival'. But this is simply taking evolutionary theory as a philosophy, which it isn't. It's a scientific theory, intended to explain the emergence of species. You should take the time to peruse some of the essays linked to my profile page, notably Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, and It Ain't Necessarily.

to obey a rule is to act; — Banno

But not only to behave oneself in the manner of the rule. Also it is to discourage and exclude incorrect behaviours from the game.

I don't claim Witty says this. But it was my point here.

A language-game is analogous to a chess game, i.e., you're either playing chess or not. To say you're playing chess, when you're making the wrong moves, is not chess. It's not that you're playing chess incorrectly, you're not playing chess at all. My contention is that there are incorrect moves in the game of chess, so if you move the rook diagonally, then you're not playing chess correctly. If you're teaching the game of chess, then it seems obvious that there are correct and incorrect moves based on the rules. — Sam26

Yes! I was going to use this exact image - of playing chess - as an example, but I dropped it for brevity's sake. A few more words on why it's so important to distinguish between "not playing" (no use) and "playing wrong" (incorrect use): the issue turns on how 'use' is understood. If use is 'use in a language-game', then use is always, as it were, something 'positive'. Use for a purpose, as it were - for doing something. And the point is that if you are not doing something with a word, then in what sense can you be using it - and hence meaning something - at all?

This goes right to the heart of the issue of the 'publicness' of language: the further problem with admitting 'incorrect use' is that this more or less amounts to admitting private language. If there can be no private language for Witty, it is because all meaning is inseparable from doing: and doing is not something that can even in principle, be "private" - which is to say, unintelligible. Doing, for it to count as a 'doing', must be exhibitable. Others must be able, in principle, to 'pick it up', to learn from you how to 'go on', in a similar way.

This is also why it is so detrimental that people so often drop the 'in a language-game' part from 'meaning is use in a language-game'. Language-games are, by definition, public things. In fact, the importance of the idea of the language-game (which I think is so often missed) is that they admit of different kinds. This is so important in fact, that Witty very early on in the PI writes out a whole list of them: giving orders, reporting, requesting, thanking, etc. This is further why language-games are not just 'contexts' (another term that is almost wholly absent from the PI). Would would it even mean to try and 'give orders' privately? Or request privately?

The inseparability of 'use' and 'language-game': they are mutually, 'analytically' defined by means of one another, means that a use which is not a doing is simply not a use at all. One can of course, try to do something, but in a wrong way. One can make a wrong move in chess, and one can say: 'that's not a move you can make'. And like @Banno said, this can introduce novelties. But the introduction of novelties still implies that one must be trying to play chess - it must be something that others, in the future, can also pick up (the en passant): this use expands the language-game: it alters chess itself. Chess is something different after the introduction of the en passant. A new use will bring with it a new language-game in tow, after which one cannot say of that use that it is incorrect. Prior to it's introduction, the en passant was simply a move in a language-game not accepted as chess.

You're the one who introduced animal communications into the conversation, as if that were meaningful in respect of the nature of language and conceptual thought. — Wayfarer

I stand by that. It makes sense to look at simpler animals and their communication for the foundations of our own.

Now you're appealing to 'survival' as if that is a criteria of what is true. As if the only criteria you have for deciding 'what is true' is 'what contributes to survival'. — Wayfarer

The point is merely to stress that communication is situated in a world, and that it helps organisms survive in their difficult world by synchronizing their behavior. I don't think it's helpful to understand the meaning of "true" as "whatever helps one survive." (I don't have some final theory or definition of truth. I use the word as an animal might use its claw, in many different context-dependent ways.)

But this is simply taking evolutionary theory as a philosophy, which it isn't. — Wayfarer

Well it has been taken that way by some perhaps, but it's not what I'm about. Perhaps you are projecting one of your favorite foils inappropriately. To me it seems that you are reading gray as black. Yes, I think of humans as the most complicated of currently-known animals, with communication that's fundamentally about thriving in this world (which presupposes surviving in it.) The rest seems to be stuff you've added on (like the "true" is "whatever allows us to survive", etc.)

I don't think it's helpful to understand the meaning of "true" as "whatever helps one survive." — hanaH

But that is what you said:

Perhaps it's human vanity that prevents us from simply looking at social animals and seeing how their signals allow them to coordinate their behavior and therefore get fed or avoid becoming food, which is to say survive. — hanaH

It's not 'human vanity'. It's a fact that humans make artefacts and create languages, and that animals don't. So trying to explain that as a fuction of evolution casts no light. But I do agree that this is tangential to this thread so will leave off.

I get what you are saying, but I think it's problematic to call some personally assigned referent an "alternative meaning." This is because it's best to think about "meaning" being something like the system of behavior and worldly entities that includes spoken or written words. The "meaning" of a stop sign is (something like) the fact that people stop at it most of the time.

(I've been suggesting that talk of referents is, in general, more misleading than helpful. Better, in rational discussions, to say with what is public.) — hanaH

How do you think it is problematic? I can say that when I write or speak 'gronk' I mean or refer to horse. Of course that would be of no importance to public discourse, but it's not in any way confusing as far as I can tell. (Of course this purportedly private meaning would really be a public meaning insofar as it denotes horse; a denotation that would be impossible without the public language already being in place).

If there is a private mental accompaniment to that stopping, so be it, but it's not important.

Sure, but that wasn't what I have been intending to address. Someone could arbitrarily choose that, for them, the stop sign doesn't mean stop, but go. Of course, they wouldn't last long putting that into practice.

I can say that when I write or speak 'gronk' I mean or refer to horse. Of course that would be of no importance to public discourse, but it's not in any way confusing as far as I can tell. (Of course this purportedly private meaning would really be a public meaning insofar as it denotes horse; a denotation that would be impossible without the public language already being in place). — Janus

I agree that you could do that, and we do use 'mean' that way often enough. You make a good point at the end, which incidentally Wittgenstein also made.

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.

How do you think it is problematic? — Janus

It's not a practical problem, but philosophically the concept-as-immaterial-referent doesn't seem very useful. By definition, we can't check such referents directly.

It may be an oversimplification, but I think a good path into Wittgenstein involves thinking of human communication as if it were just the communication of another, less complicated animal. Let's see how far we can get without immaterial referents that may be no more rational or useful than phlogiston.

"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."
— Wittgenstein (Blue Book)

There seems a suggestion of 'vitalism' - that 'meaning' might be thereby construed as being 'something immaterial', something which might, erroneously, be thought to exist separately from the sign. — Wayfarer

That is very interesting about Frege, thank you @hanaH (do you have a page # for the Blue Book cite?). I agree with your seeing Wittgenstein as reacting to that (why he spends such an inordinate amount of time battling against the idea of "meaning" as a thing/cause, or any mental process). Also, it reminds me that for Wittgenstein there is a sense of language being alive. And instead of giving us the power of life over words, he lands on the idea of an expression. Not that an expression (or something non-word) is connected to something in us that is made external (nor "used"), but that it, in a sense**, merely happens--only that it occurs--but at a point in time, in a place, to be considered perhaps against what just happened (or not), in this culture, in relation to a sense/use of a concept (or not), by me as a reflection on me and in creating my responsibility for it. That in all that it is thus alive, or can be given life in investigating the implications of all of the above (by me or someone else). (**This is not to say that we do not sometimes reflect on what to say, choose what words to say, or try to make a point, influence a certain reaction, etc., but these do not change the impersonal sense of an expression, how it is (and can not be) meaningful, or the determination of the use of a concept(s).) Also, it is interesting that a lot of the time there is the picture that thought is alive until it is put into language, and then, having been cemented in an expression, it is thus dead. But, even so, we can, in a sense, resurrect that expression each time we encounter it (read/listen to it).

Nobody talks much about the "incorrect" use of words.
— @bongo fury

Well, we should learn them to. — Wayfarer

J.L. Austin is a great example of first starting with how things don't work. His work A Plea for Excuses is really an investigation into how action works, but he starts with how it fails.

It's not a practical problem, but philosophically the concept-as-immaterial-referent doesn't seem very useful. By definition, we can't check such referents directly.

It may be an oversimplification, but I think a good path into Wittgenstein involves thinking of human communication as if it were just the communication of another, less complicated animal. Let's see how far we can get without immaterial referents that may be no more rational or useful than phlogiston. — hanaH

Do we need to be able to check referents (whatever that might mean: that they are really there,
perhaps?). I see no conceptual problem involved in referring to the headache I have today, or even the one I had yesterday, even though it is not possible to check the verity of their (present or past) existences.

Sure, I might be lying and then I would not be referring to anything that is occurring or had occurred, but rather to a fiction that I am purporting is occurring or had occurred. The fact that we all know headaches occur should be enough to establish the coherence of the idea that we can refer to them.

We add and subtract from the rules. — Banno

And this itself is valid iff it's done with the consensus of the current players.

Meaning is not use, strictly speaking, but use indicates meaning. — Janus

:up:

In dropping talk of meaning in favour of talk about use, we demote stating rules in favour of enacting them. — Banno

:100:

Using a tool for a task for which it is not made or cannot satisfy is an example of "incorrect usage", no? Others may repeat this which only indictates that misusing the tool is "popular" for the moment. Witty takes aim at common misuses of words/concepts in philosophy (re: using moves from nonphilosophical language-games in philosophical language-games) that had become "popular" with philosophers. No "private language" is implied by "incorrect use" (or misuse) of words failing to mean – make sense – in a language-game, only confusion, especially, for Witty et al, the kinds of confusions of which many "philosophical problems" consist.

But that is what you said: — Wayfarer

All I can say is read more carefully. It wasn't a good paraphrase.

It's not 'human vanity'. It's a fact that humans make artefacts and create languages, and that animals don't. So trying to explain that as a fuction of evolution casts no light. But I do agree that this is tangential to this thread so will leave off. — Wayfarer

Note that you brought the evolution of species up. At some point I mentioned the evolution of communication systems, but that's different.

I said: perhaps it's human vanity that prevents us from simply looking at social animals and seeing how their signals allow them to coordinate their behavior and therefore get fed or avoid becoming food, which is to say survive. [and applying those lessons to our own communcation ---which I was hinting toward.]

The point is that they signal one another, body to body, in order to survive and thrive as a "team" of bodies in a world of objects, including food and predators. The theme here is that meaning is "in the world," in the (or as the) relationship between their cries and their food and their predators.

Animals absolutely have language, not least owing to the fact that we are animals through and through. What is specific about us is our ability to wield negation, and with it, the practice of symbolic, rather than indexical and iconic, uses of language. We can treat 'not-X' as an entity unto itself, and give that use a grammar. A cool cognitive trick, chanced upon by the contingency of our animal evolutionary history, nothing more.

The fact that we all know headaches occur should be enough to establish the coherence of the idea that we can refer to them. — Janus

I hear you, and this is something like the point of the beetle in the box. The "headache in itself" plays no role. It's impossible in principle to compare headaches, and it's therefore absurd to think that the "meaning" of headache is some quale-as-referent. It's far more reasonable to examine how the token "headache" is entangled with other public behavior (including the use of other tokens.) This is how we learn the "meaning" of "headache" to begin with.

Here's Wittgenstein on this strange issue:

The essential thing about private experience is really not that each person possesses his own exemplar, but that nobody knows whether other people also have this or something else. The assumption would thus be possible—though unverifiable—that one section of mankind had one sensation of red and another section another. What am I to say about the word "red"?—that it means something 'confronting us all' and that everyone should really have another word, besides this one, to mean his own sensation of red? Or is it like this: the word "red" means something known to everyone; and in addition, for each person, it means something known only to him?

These silly questions bring the house down, IMO.

It's impossible in principle to compare headaches, and it's therefore absurd to think that the "meaning" of headache is some quale-as-referent. It's far more reasonable to examine how the token "headache" is entangled with other public behavior (including the use of other tokens.) This is how we learn the "meaning" of "headache" to begin with. — hanaH

I agree that it is impossible in principle to compare headaches. I don't agree that the ""meaning" of "headache"" is learned entirely on account of public behavior, though. One could not learn the meaning of headache if one had never felt pain. One could learn something of the meaning of headache, even if they had never had a headache, if they had felt pain, because then it could be explained "you know, it's a pain in the head".

:up: Yes, negation and also generalization (which would be impossible without negation). The question that seems to forefront is as to whether negation is possible without generalization. In any case symbolic language seems to be the key difference between us and the other animals.