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. — 180 Proof
Ah, Fool buddy, you've shot yourself in the dark again. :smirk: — 180 Proof
There is no "Wittgensteinian problem of language-games" that I can see. Besides, "a scientific one" would just comprise another language-game. You either find Witty's semantics useful for clarifying our discursive (bad) habits or you do not. I very much do. — 180 Proof
The PI could have justifiably – more precisely – been titled "Philosophical Reminders". He isn't providing new knowledge, Fool; Witty is elucidating confused and inconsistent discursive practices – calling attention to how philosophers in particular myopicly misuse ordinary language to, what he thought, say what cannot be said rather than shutting up when and where silence articulates – shows – what words cannot. — 180 Proof
Okay. Now you've done it! I have to reread PI. Thanks. :brow:His menagerie of linguistic ills - language in idle, being mislead by grammar, being captured by a picture, and so on - all bear upon words employed without a language game; that is, without even a role like a rook that could, even in principle, be said to be 'wrong'. This distinction is what is novel and important in Witty. — StreetlightX
Yeah, this is exactly what Witty objects to (e.g. essences).Philosophers are the ones who maintain strict standards of word usage (definitionally accurate). — TheMadFool
A 2nd-order metaphor (i.e. technique of grammatical analysis).What exactly is a language game?
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Employments of language which do nothing, which serve no purpose. It is one thing to move the rook qua rook in the 'wrong way'. It is quite another to throw the horse shaped piece across the room and call it chess. In the one the piece at least has a role. In the latter it does not (incidentally, the issue of "role" appears over and over and over again in the PI - and it is almost criminally under-remarked upon - unlike 'misuse' which, again, doesn't appear even once in the entire book). The 'philosophical problems' that Witty diagnoses belong entirely to the latter category. — StreetlightX
How much of philosophy depends on the existence of private languages? — TheMadFool
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. — StreetlightX
The problem, it seems to me, is that in the chess example, i.e., throwing a piece across the room, that doesn't even look like a move in chess. At least in language, it appears that you are doing something with the word, because of the grammar of language. Maybe the chess example should involve something not so radical, to bring it more in line with what's happening in language, but I'm not sure what that would be. Maybe something like, after you have learned the moves, you keep trying to move the rook diagonally, to fit some notion you have about rooks. — Sam26
Okay. Now you've done it! I have to reread PI. Thanks. :brow: — 180 Proof
Is there a common fumble, a contemporary example in mind that illustrates "words that are misused in contrast to words said that are not actually used" I don't really know what the difference is in practice. — Saphsin
Agreed, let's play along with Wittgenstein, and one, agree words are minus essences (family resemblance) but what exactly does "use" mean in meaning is use? A word is, all said and done, a symbol/sign - it stands for something, the referent. A word's use is predicated on that purpose/function. Take that away and how exactly am I supposed to use a word? — TheMadFool
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.)
if one interprets it literally, then we have a problem which is that people don't use the word "meaning" as they use the word "using". — Olivier5
But then, if meaning is indeed literally use, how come "meaning" is not being used as "use" in English? Isn't it self contradictory? — Olivier5
It's a metaphor, — hanaH
as Saussure also noted, the nomenclature theory of meaning is basically pre-scientific. — hanaH
. To me Wittgenstein is more of a destructive than constructive thinker — hanaH
I can agree with that. His virtue is in pointing out that certain issues are more complicated than they seem, or ambiguous. — Olivier5
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.)
This distinction is what is novel and important in Witty. Everyone knows words can be used wrong. That's trivial and uninteresting. Witt is ultimately concerned about words which are, as it were, 'not even used' (to paraphrase the old 'not even wrong'). Employments of language which do nothing, which serve no purpose. — StreetlightX
All this by way of agreeing with Davidson, that while it is tempting to think of language as dependent on agreed conventions of some sort, it isn't so. For any convention one might take up, there will be an ingenious or ignorant construct to undermine it.
And this is also what Pop, and others, who deem language no more than transmission and reception of signals, are doomed never to be able to account for. — Banno
There is no way I could divine what the word "beetle" or "pain" means to you and vice versa.
We're only left, therefore, with the word "beetle" ("pain") and nothing else. You and I could very well be talking about entirely different things (referents). Thus, the conclusion that philosophies that depend on experiences that can't be made public, shared, are private would be pointless. It's like using a word without knowing what it means. — TheMadFool
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.
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