Not the solipsism of a closed system but a continuous exposure to and being affected by an outside. — Joshs
For Intended meaning to be present to itself it must come back to itself , and in doing so, it already means something other than what it intended. — Joshs
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ryle/Ryle suggests that ‘John knows French’ is a warrant which gives us the right to infer that John understands what he reads in Le Monde or that he is communicating successfully when telephoning in French. Immediately on specifying what we are entitled to do with the inference ticket ‘John knows French’, Ryle admits that the examples of what would satisfy the sentence are too precise, for
[w]e should not withdraw our statement that he knows French on finding that he did not respond pertinently when asleep, absentminded, drunk, or in a panic; or on finding that he did not correctly translate highly technical treatises. We expect no more than that he will ordinarily cope pretty well with the majority of ordinary French-using and French-following tasks. ‘Knows French’ is a vague expression and, for most purposes, none the less useful for being vague. (1949a, 119)
To me this is drifting in the wrong direction, from the unhidden back to the hidden, from public doings back to the pseudo-explanatory entities of the metaphysicians — hanaH
A living being - whether a human being or an animal being - could not have any relation to another being as such without this alterity in time, without, that is, memory, anticipation, this strange sense (I hesitate to call it knowledge) that every now, every instant is radically other and nevertheless in the same form of the now. — Joshs
For me it's not even there to begin with, not when it comes to the grand terms. (I can more or less intend to say thank you and accidentally say you're welcome.) It's as if even our complicated metaphysical statements are still just complex animal sounds, merely determinate enough in their "meaning," and far from crystalline. — hanaH
this is still just talk about the occult interior. In this context it doesn't seem relevant. What you make of my prioritizing bodies in the world, using signals to work together? "Sign" might already be misleading here inasmuch as we tend to think of the sign as the envelope of a letter. — hanaH
I read all of them through all of them, when I can manage it (all of them that I've gotten around to, that is, and within the limits of memory & interest.) — hanaH
On the contrary, it is the notion of ‘body’ and materiality’ as causal conditioning agents that presupposes an occult interior. — Joshs
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.
I guess the question I have is. are you aware of this split amount Wittgenstein interpreters, can you articulate what it consists of , and which camp do you prefer? — Joshs
It is relies on, is constituted by, defining a closed off region of the "self", then, by fiat, declaring this self to already be public, which - and this is the real problem - is apparently then all the more reason to discount the actual public — StreetlightX
The issue isn't with an original sociality as such, the issue is that by constantly making a hard and fast distinction between original sociality, and socaility in the normal sense (and then constantly retreating back into the shell of the former, as a pristine, self-enclosed space), is to not take seriously enough the idea of an original sociality, which ought to contaminate - in the Derridian sense - this very distinction. There is an original sociality. But it can in no sense be "proper" to the self without the supplement of society writ large. — StreetlightX
presume an opposition between an inside and an outside. — Joshs
The topic is The Essence of Wittgenstein. Let's stay focused? — hanaH
In crossword puzzles, we must discover words based on the number of letters and non-canonical definitions invented by the crossword composer. These definitions can be ambiguous and there lies one of the tricks played by composers to solvers: the definition may not mean what it seems to mean, prima facie; IOW there's an obvious meaning to the definition, but it often hides another one, occult in a way, which offers the key to the solution.
An example that comes to mind, not a great one: "a third person" in 3 letters --> she. Third person is to be understood grammatically, not literally. — Olivier5
The case of poetry is different, of course, and more noble and all that. I can't even try to deal with it here, except for stressing that a great deal of its beauty lies in euphonia, i.e. words used as music, as sounds. There we do have a use of words that is not (only) referential but also aesthetic. — Olivier5
Magic is again about the power of the verb, a power that is thought of as physical: if I say "abracadabra" a flower will bloom or a rabbit will vanish or or a person will get sick. It is therefore a use of words beyond reference as well, and in fact those magic words like "abracadabra" often have no meaning at all other than as a spell. You can't buy an abracadabra on the market. — Olivier5
It just means there's no eternal dictionary somewhere. It's really not complicated or controversial.
Some words are so old their roots are prehistoric. For us, those words seem eternal: — frank
I don't see it. The signs aren't arbitrary but inherited (unless you just mean Saussure stuff). I am thrown into a world of handshakes, salutes, and stop signs which are on the same "plane" as ice cream, parachutes, and mustaches. I thrive by acting on correlations prudently (sifting out "causation" or the more reliable ones.)I’m not trying to talk about beetles in boxes, I’m trying to show that a reading of Wittgenstein that consists of behavioral linkages between arbitrary signs relies on a beetle in box picture. — Joshs
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a2The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.
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.
— TheMadFool
The picture of a word and its object (referent) as the only way anything is meaningful is the exact thing which makes a "solution" impossible. Imagine an example: "I have a pain in my throat" "Hey, me too!" "But mine is congested at the top and scratchy as it goes down." "Mine too! That's funny; we have the same pain." Now does the possibility that our pain might have turned out to be different seem less scary? Say: "Oh well, mine is more just dry and constricted, but sorry you're not feeling well!" which is, nonetheless, my knowledge of the other's pain, in knowledge's sense(use) of my acknowledgment of your pain, as: "I know you are in pain." — Antony Nickles
It's all got to do with how we define the word "definition".
My guesstimate is that if our aim is to understand reality, the definition of "definition" will have to be tailored to that end. That's the reason why we've defined "definition" as about essential features (essences).
However, just like Bolyai & Lobachevsky (mathematicians) ushered in the era of non-Euclidean geometry simply by tinkering with the parallel postulate, we could to alter the definition of "definition", make it about something other than essences or play around with its logical structure (e.g. replace AND with OR) and see what happens, let the chips fall where they may in a manner of speaking.
Maybe, just maybe, something amazing might happen as it did with non-Euclidean geometry (theory of relativity). — TheMadFool
Computers allegedly can't comprehend i.e. they're semantically-challenged but that's in the sign-referent sense. If meaning is use, computers and AI do understand words; they are, after all, using words. — TheMadFool
If computers become able to socialize as well as humans, I suspect that the grammar of 'understand' will shift to include them. Given our 'meat chauvinism,' a human-like body as in Ex Machina would accelerate this process. Current AI that's designed to chat is trained on mountains of our own human chatter, scraped from the internet. Unfortunately such programs are only exposed to the relationship of words to other words as opposed to words and the world (for now, last I checked.) Or you can say the world of such a being is nothing but words (which further reduces to integers and floats.) — hanaH
Just as computers, not even AI, we, with respect to private experiences, are simply manipulating symbols. — TheMadFool
As for words further reducing to "integers and floats", even with humans they reduce to something similar - action potentials in neurons and their synapses. — TheMadFool
Don't forget that we have bodies! We also chew food, turn steering wheels, scrub cast iron pans. Even our symbols are physical, something our bodies do. We vibrate the air with our lungs and mouth. We smear liquids on solids. We salute, wave, bow. — hanaH
Yes, and it's strange. Is there magic in the meat? Or would something else work? Does something else already work? And we just can't recognize it? Maybe it hasn't been to this planet yet. I don't think we know what "consciousness" means anymore than our ability to use it for practical purposes (or something like that, perhaps an overstatement.) — hanaH
Essentially, talking about exclusively private experiences is impossible IF (Antony Nickles) meaning is taken in the sign-referent sense. — TheMadFool
Bluntly, the desire to have something certain (the referent) blinds us to the actual workings of our personal, individual, secret, expressed/repressed, rejected/accepted experiences and sensations. If I am alone on the edge of the grand canyon watching the sun set, I am not being truthful if I say "it is impossible to talk about my exclusive private experience". I have things I can say, and can continue to, and to answer questions, and clarify distinctions, etc. for as long as we want to have a meaningful discussion about my purely private experience. Now if I claim there is something more to my experience that I can't tell you, I am keeping that secret (as if for myself), refusing to be known, and that desire to be unknowable is the flip-side of the desire that my experience is a certain object to which I specifically refer to when I say something (that I am thus fully expressed; that I do not have to play a part in saying something meaningful). — Antony Nickles
Derrida talks about this stuff. Writing tends to be cast as a dead thing, as opposed to speech which is living. But, as you mention, speech is not so pure in relation to writing. — hanaH
the semantics (the beetle, the pain) "drops out of consideration". — TheMadFool
I don't see how it does. If you go and see a doctor about your pain in the neck, he will inspect your neck and maybe find something objectively wrong with it. — Olivier5
There doesn't have to be an "eternal dictionary" for words to draw their meaning in the sign-referent sense. — TheMadFool
Interesting post. — Banno
It also failed because of reasons linked to economy of means: there are too many concepts to allocate one specific sign to each of them. — Olivier5
I don't see how it does. If you go and see a doctor about your pain in the neck, he will inspect your neck and maybe find something objectively wrong with it. — Olivier5
So the highest god is written down as an eye floating over a throne. — Olivier5
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