The methods used in the PI is more valuable than the theory expounded. — Banno

Than what theory?

Either there is no theory to be "less valuable" or Wittgenstein is wrong about what he was doing. Which is it?

This makes me wonder whether, on your interpretation, Wittgenstein would count religions or theologies as language games. — Janus

That is exactly the sort of question I think might be wrongheaded, and it's the sort of question a lot of us have felt ourselves wanting to ask after reading Wittgenstein. (For instance, I believe he nowhere says that philosophy "is a language-game".)

But what if there's no ontology here at all, no saying this practice here, this is a language-game, but that one isn't? What if language-games are just a sort of flashlight (remember this, @Banno?) you can shine on the thinking and talking and so on that people do? What if, instead of saying that the language-game is that which gives sense to an utterance or a word used in an utterance -- what if we only said that language-games are a way of seeing how an utterance can make sense, how a word can be given sense by being used in such a way? Not a question of what's there -- is this or that a language-game? -- but of how we look at language use.

Nobody uses private, untranslatable languages. Witt wasn't attacking a thesis anybody anywhere has ever held.

He was just highlighting that language is a tool for communication between people who are immersed and embedded in a world. — frank

:ok: There is this general sentiment, as evidenced by the way debates are conducted (the first order of business being define one's terms), that people (usually) have idiosyncratic definitions of words for concepts that play a major role in a discussion. Such words, with personal meanings can be viewed as constituting the vocab of a private language.

Suppose X and Y are engaged in a conversation about God. X claims God exists. Y is unsure if his understanding of God and existence is the same as X's. So Y demands that X define "God" and "exists". X will naturally comply. Say X says "God is being who's all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful". Y again faces the same problem. Is his (Y's) understanding of good, knowledge, and power the same as X's? This process reiterates at all levels of clarifications of meaning X attempts.

There must be a point at which Y stops asking for further clarification on the meaning of the words X uses - Y is confident that X and Y are on the same page so to speak. Is this a possibility? :chin:

That's an interesting take. It would seem to follow, though, that if language games are ways of seeing how utterances can make sense, then theologies, religions and poetry would all count as language games, unless you wanted to claim that no sense is made in some or all of those disciplines.

Or perhaps I have misunderstood you?

Wittgenstein is saying something new only if the prevailing theory of language holds that each one of us has our own private version of the meaning of the words. — TheMadFool

I can't see how that could be a sound enough theory to attract many adherents. We learn, we don't invent, the meanings of words. I agree with @Joshs that each of us has our own unique set of meanings (or better associations) around words. Conventional meanings can be stretched by association; for example when it is said that men are dogs; but that "stretching" is still reliant on conventional usages.

Nobody uses private, untranslatable languages. Witt wasn't attacking a thesis anybody anywhere has ever held....

— @frank

:ok: — TheMadFool

That's not right. See 2. The Significance of the Issue

From which:

Philosophers are especially tempted to suppose that numbers and sensations are examples of such absolutes, self-identifying objects which themselves force upon us the rules for the use of their names. Wittgenstein discusses numbers in earlier sections on rules (185–242) ... In the case of numbers, one temptation is to confuse the mathematical sense of ‘determine’ in which, say, the formula y = 2x determines the numerical value of y for a given value of x (in contrast with y > 2x, which does not) with a causal sense in which a certain training in mathematics determines that normal people will always write the same value for y given both the first formula and a value for x — in contrast with creatures for which such training might produce a variety of outcomes. This confusion produces the illusion that the result of an actual properly conducted calculation is the inevitable outcome of the mathematical determining, as though the formula’s meaning itself were shaping the course of events.

Help me out here - surely, 'the creatures for which such training might produce a variety of outcomes' simply can't do maths. I mean, whoever fills in those values has no latitude in what those values are. Is there something I'm not seeing, or a point I'm not getting?

if language games are ways of seeing how utterances can make sense, then theologies, religions and poetry would all count as language games, unless you wanted to claim that no sense is made in some or all of those disciplines. — Janus

You're still asking the wrong question -- as bolded -- at least as we're trying this out.

Early Wittgenstein had a doctrine -- I think, am I remembering this right? or is this just a Vienna Circle thing -- about what might make a statement senseless. Later Wittgenstein, it always seems to me, denies the presumption of sense, and instead of a bin marked "senseless" to chuck things in, he has an in-basket of things that have not yet been given sense, not yet shown to be meaningful.

Dumb example: a philosopher asks, "How do I know that tree there is real?" and presumes that the question makes sense, because, because, well, it's grammatical English. Does it make sense? There's no answer to that right off, not even the answer that it is senseless. You can say, well, if I lived next-door to a Hollywood backlot, I might very well look out my window and wonder if the tree I'm looking at is real.

That much you could get from Austin, showing you a situation in which it would be quite clear what is meant by asking if a tree is real. Since that's clearly not what the philosopher thinks he meant, the burden is his to show us a situation in which his meaning would be that clear. Insofar as there is a standard to meet, a paradigm to measure up to, it's ordinary language. It's not that only ordinary language is permissible, but that if you hope to be making sense, you hope to be making sense the way ordinary language does.

That would be the sense in which Wittgenstein is only offering reminders, not a theory. He doesn't offer a new standard, one he just made up himself and is satisfied with, of how to decide whether some utterance is meaningful. He's offering a way for you to see for yourself, a way of looking in which it will be perfectly clear whether it's meaningful.

I really think that means that Wittgenstein, unlike the logical positivists, gives you no grounds for dismissing religious speech, for example, as meaningless. But he does deny you the presumption that it is meaningful. If it is woven into the fabric of people's lives, if whether you say this or you say that is consequential for them, if it is as plain to the members of a faith community what their religious speech means as "Would you pass the salt?" is to 'us', outsiders to that faith, then what is there to say?

If, on the other hand, you ask your friend the believer a question about his faith and he gives you an answer that, let's say, "feels" like it's just as abstract or vague or insubstantial as your question, and as you question each answer you get some similar-feeling verbiage each time, so that you feel like you're digging a hole in mud, never making any progress... Yeah, you might begin to suspect that he doesn't know what his faith means any better than you. All he's got is words he says that you don't, and they only connect to other words he says that you don't, a machine that runs alright but has no evident function.

As a poet, you might want to build exactly that sort of machine. (William Carlos Williams defines "poem" as "a small machine, made of words".) --- No need to get into that here. --- But as a philosopher, you want to avoid doing that. I think part of what Wittgenstein is after is how it is possible to build such a useless machine, how it can be done without realizing it, and whether there are ways of thinking -- perhaps even ways we cannot completely avoid!-- that are particularly likely to lead to pointless machine building.

Around here I'm reaching the limits of even guessing though...

That's not right. See 2. The Significance of the Issue — Banno

Look again, Banno. You're wrong.

Suppose X and Y are engaged in a conversation about God. X claims God exists. Y is unsure if his understanding of God and existence is the same as X's. So Y demands that X define "God" and "exists". X will naturally comply. Say X says "God is being who's all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful". Y again faces the same problem. Is his (Y's) understanding of good, knowledge, and power the same as X's? This process reiterates at all levels of clarifications of meaning X attempts.

There must be a point at which Y stops asking for further clarification on the meaning of the words X uses - Y is confident that X and Y are on the same page so to speak. Is this a possibility? :chin: — TheMadFool

If I ask what you mean by "God", it's not that I think you have a personal definition. It's that different language communities use it differently.

Ultimately, I think people understand one another through empathy. If I put myself in your shoes, or try to see the world through your eyes, it becomes obvious what you intend.

words are signs we use for referents, the actual thing that interests us. Words that we use to refer to private experiences (can't be shared with others) are like the word "beetle" e.g. the word "pain"... We're only left, therefore, with the word "beetle" ("pain") and nothing else. — TheMadFool

And so if language cannot "refer" (directly as it were) to our--let's call it "personal"--experience, than we feel we must, as Kant did, cordon off the referent (the thing-in-itself) to preserve the qualities of certainty and universality, etc. we associate with any "essence" of something. In his discussion of the beetle and in imagining a private language (and a boiling pot), we take Witt to be intent on destroying the referent/the object/the thing-in-itself/the essence/our experience.

Pure subjective experiences are exactly the kind that we can't show to other people - they're categorically private. — TheMadFool

This is the picture solipsism has of itself. It comes from the desire to remain unknowable, to have and keep something fundamentally special about me. And people take Witt as making a point of denying our individual experience (sensation).

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. — Witt (cited by HanaH)

And here people take this as only that the object is irrelevant; that the internal is no longer under consideration, or is turned inside out. As in:

It's far more reasonable [than picturing meaning as a referent] to examine how the token "headache" is entangled with other public behavior (including the use of other tokens.) — hanaH

So we have destroyed the referent and are merely discussing language.

To me Wittgenstein is more of a destructive than constructive thinker — hanaH

Which Witt specifically admits (and denies).

Where does this investigation get its importance from, given that it seems only to destroy everything interesting: that is, all that is great and important? (As it were, all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) But what we are destroying are only houses of cards, and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood. — Witt, PI #118

But "clearing up the ground" implies readying it for another project:

What gives the impression that we want to deny anything?... Why should I deny there is a mental process?... [The Interlocutor asks:] Aren't you at bottom really saying that everything except human behavior is a fiction? If I speak of a fiction, then it is of a grammatical fiction. — Witt, PI #305-307

And so the point of all this is not to erase the individual experience, but to turn us from picturing our sensations, experience, etc., as working the same as anything else.

[The dilemma goes away] only if we make a radical break [with the grammar which tries to force itself on us that] ...language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose. — Witt, PI #304

So he is specifically not destroying what is "interesting" to us, what "is great and important" (see above). He is preserving essence, our individual experience--or, to say it so as not to lead to a confusing picture--what is essential about (to) each thing being what it is. Notice the "if" in his quote at the top. If the grammar of the expression of sensation is not construed on the model of 'object and designation', than we are not irrelevant. But then, what is the grammar of the expression of sensation in which we are not irrelevant?

[Knowing how to use a word properly] would be an inadequate conception inasmuch as it does not include the input derived from having experienced pain. Understanding pain cannot be wholly to do with what you can know about another, because in all cases their behavior could be wholly faked — Janus

And this is the fear of the uncertainty of the other. Yes, we can be fooled, mistaken (not only because it can be kept secret). And what we can find out is only "external" (though the expressiveness of the other is more than we see; our understanding is more than their behavior). But what it comes down to is that we want to know the other so we do not have to address them; but the "grammar of the expression of a sensation" is 1) that I don't know my pain--I have my pain and I express it (or repress it); and 2) you either accept (or reject) my expression of pain (it is also not a matter of knowledge). So, again:

Pure subjective experiences are exactly the kind that we can't show to other people - they're categorically private. — TheMadFool

But what is essential about our experience is not that we cannot entirely, completely express our experience or know the other's, but that we are separate. I can continue to express and respond to you regarding my experience (or hide it), and our experience is identical to the extent to which we accept that it is the same. This is the grammar of our experience by which the essence of it (what is essential to it) is expressed.

we should all be talking about why LW doesn't think his theory is a theory. — Srap Tasmaner

We could call what he is trying to have you see for yourself, an insight. He is not making statements (true/false or empirical) that would tell you something, give you knowledge (these are not his opinions). They are provisional claims about how each different thing does what it does. So they would be "theories" about every different thing (each grammatical claim), except that this is a method (for all of us) where one lays something out (to show the other), and then, if they see it (its aspect of difference from other things)--if it is something so ordinary that everyone would agree--why would we call it a theory? (#128) Without your seeing for yourself, the claim is rejected, isolated, impotent.

And so, like Austin, these (games, rules, mental processes, pain, etc.) are all examples, to show us a way to see the vast array of the world, to find our way back to understanding the essence of things we want to find out about--truth, justice, aesthetics, religion, etc. But he is not cataloguing knowledge like Aristotle; he is trying to make the gears of philosophy mesh back together and grind forward again.

This makes me wonder whether, on your interpretation, Wittgenstein would count religions or theologies as language games. — Janus

I don't think so. But Witty had... interesting views on religion. If you haven't, take a read of his Lecture on Ethics [PDF]. It's about 8 pages long, and it quite explicitly sets both religion and ethics outside the realms of what can be said. That is, what can belong to a language-game:

"[With respect to ethics and religion] we cannot express what we want to express and that all we say about the absolute miraculous remains nonsense. ... My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk ethics or religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely, hopeless. – Ethics, so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it".

So although it is, in Witty's technical terms, nonsense, he still accords it a great deal of respect. A charitable reading would be to say that ethics and religion fall on the side on the side of 'pure showing': a showing that cannot be said. Hence the rather enigmatic 'wonder at the existence of language itself':

"Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself. ... For all I have said by shifting the expression of the miraculous from an expression by means of language to the expression by the existence of language"

Notably this lecture was given pre-PI. It has a very Tractarian ring to it, and it's not clear how, if at all, the renovations in the PI might have altered these views.

If I ask what you mean by "God", it's not that I think you have a personal definition. It's that different language communities use it differently — frank

This doesn't help in any way because a communal, social meaning can't be had unless each inidvidual makes his own private/personal meaning public/social and that's exactly what's problematic. So long as it's possible to have a very personal/private interpretation of words, the problem of private languages extends to communities as well.

But what is essential about our experience is not that we cannot entirely, completely express our experience or know the other's, but that we are separate. I can continue to express and respond to you regarding my experience (or hide it), and our experience is identical to the extent to which we accept that it is the same. This is the grammar of our experience by which the essence of it (what is essential to it) is expressed. — Antony Nickles

The beetle in the box: The word is same - "beetle" - but what it refers to maybe different. Wittgenstein's aim is not to come up with a solution, it seems impossible, but to do an exposé of the problem.

How many philosophical issues are beetle-in-the-box kind?0

Why does he insist he's not offering a theory? Is he mistaken about that? Is he actually offering a theory about language? If he's mistaken about that, surely that's pretty interesting, and we should all be talking about why LW doesn't think his theory is a theory. — Srap Tasmaner

The simple answer is that Witty thinks language can be many different kinds of things, none of which can be specified exhaustively in advance. On his understanding of 'theory', a 'theory' of language would say something like: language is such and such, and that which does not fall under such and such specifications, would not be a language. For the most part, Witty's target is himself: the Witty of the Tractatus that tried to specify a 'general form of the proposition'. But on (later) Witty's reading, language is something like a resource, or a fund: it can be used for very many different things, perhaps things we can yet not imagine. Language is as language does (or what is done with language), as it were. And what is done with language is un-theorizable in advance.

One could, in a manner of speaking, call this a theory, and in an expanded sense it is. I think, to be finicky, I'd call it a meta-theory: a theory about theories of language, which basically says: "don't do it, bad idea".

Postulated images don't give life to the system. Why should they? — hanaH

I agree there's no particular reason to assume that the meaning of words would hide in images. Just because one can illustrate a concept via a picture or a painting doesn't imply that the nature of concepts is to be found in images. Vice versa, just because the meaning of words is elusive and cannot be fully captured by a definition doesn't imply that it's inexistant. In the silence of the mind, we know what words mean to us. We can play with concepts in the manner Husserl does, i.e. analyse their use and possible misuse, so as to elicit their meaning.

In effect Husserl did apply the aphorism "meaning is use" to explore his essences.

What about incorrect uses? People use words incorrectly all the time, is their incorrect use driving the meaning of the word?
— Sam26

I love this question. Especially if we substitute "usage" for "meaning". — bongo fury

Meaning is use

Ludwig Wittegenstein: Sign-Referent concept of meaning is bollocks.

---

When we say a sign's (a word's) meaning is its referent we are using the sign (the word) to stand for the referent. That is to say, inter alia [1*], one particular use for words is to refer to things individually or as a group (the standard definition of "meaning").

[1*] What could be other uses for words?

[1*] What could be other uses for words? — TheMadFool

Crossword puzzles, poetry, magic...

Crossword puzzles, poetry, magic... — Olivier5

Explain these uses without resorting to sign-referent theory of meaning.

Is that an order?

Is that an order? — Olivier5

A request actually.

There you go then :wink:

(Your required other uses.)

"[With respect to ethics and religion] we cannot express what we want to express and that all we say about the absolute miraculous remains nonsense. ... My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk ethics or religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely, hopeless. – Ethics, so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it".

This appears to be distinctly inconsistent with what Wittgenstein says about language and boundaries at PI 68-70, though he does seem self-contradicting within this passage here. He says that he deeply respects, and would not ridicule such "nonsense". It makes one wonder what is meant by "nonsense".

The boundaries of language are created for specific purposes, like when we create a definition for a logical proceeding. But language use, and consequently meaning, is not restricted by such boundaries. Therefore going outside "the boundaries of language" does not leave one in a world of meaningless nonsense.

Understanding this principle is key to understanding the role of freewill, and 'private language', in the creation and evolution of language in general. Claiming that the boundaries of language are "the walls of our cage", is a misrepresentation which leaves one within Plato's cave, looking at the reflections and believing them to be the reality. .

This doesn't help in any way because a communal, social meaning can't be had unless each inidvidual makes his own private/personal meaning public/social and that's exactly what's problematic. So long as it's possible to have a very personal/private interpretation of words, the problem of private languages extends to communities as well. — TheMadFool

If everyone starts with their own rules, this happens:

A request actually. — TheMadFool

The magic word was missing. Also I don't understand your request, nor why it was made.

The magic word was missing. Also I don't understand your request, nor why it was made. — Olivier5

You made a claim. Now you have to prove it. Can you?

If everyone starts with their own rules — frank

I think it's worse.

You keep giving orders to folks... Did someone die and name you king of TPF? If not, I suggest you learn to ask politely, when you have a request to make.

You keep giving orders to folks... Did someone die and named you king of TPF? Otherwise I suggest you learn to ask politely, when you have a request to make.
now — Olivier5

When you make a claim, you gotta prove it. Basic philosopher's etiquette. I look regal to you because you've forgotten your manners. Sorry about that.

You are rude and bizarre, not regal.

My claim was that people use words in a variety of activities including solving crossword puzzles, writing poetry, and casting magic spells. What part do you want evidence of?

You are rude, not regal. — Olivier5

Did someone die and name you king of TPF? — Olivier5

So, kings are rude! Copy that!

My claim was that people use words in a variety of activities including solving crossword puzzles, writing poetry, and casting magic spells. What part do you want evidence of? — Olivier5

Oh! We're back on track. Good. How are the various uses you mention above divorced from the sign-referent sense of meaning?