You don't need a justification in order to conclude that you have a headache. it is not the end product of a process of ratiocination.

As if you could justify to us your claim to have a headache by producing for us your pain - as if the pain were not itself the headache.

The objection here is not that you do not have a pain - that, for you, is certain. It's that "I know I am in pain" is like "I know I have an iPhone". — Banno

If you're right people should be saying things like "I have a headache" or "I have a stomachache" even when they don't. After all, according to you, no reasoning is involved. People complain of pain because they are in pain.

True I can't demonstrate my pain to another but surely I must to myself. However, we have to be careful to distinguish between going through pain and knowing pain. The former is a direct kind of experience (you just have pain) but the latter which involves finding the right word for the experience requires reasoning (you know you have pain).

What is lost in the straining to look for 'proper' language-games is the fact that langauge-games are practices: "language and the actions into which it is woven". And practises are more or less efficacious, more or less felicitious. A "use" is a use just to the extent that it plays a role in enabling practice. And if it doesn't, then it is not a use at all (it is use-less!). And while we can judge practices at an ethical or broadly normative level (should we be doing so and so?), the felicity of practice is indifferent to this.

PI§87: "The sign-post is in order—if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose".

That sounds reasonable, but leaves me wondering why you might think religions and theologies, which @Janus had asked about, aren't language-games. What would 'disqualify' them?

@Antony Nickles @Banno

By grammar, my hunch is, Wittgenstein is talking about the rules of a given language game. However none of the articles I read on Wittgenstein's theory gives any information on what that actually looks like? What's your take on this matter?

Another Wittgensteinian idea I haven't got a handle on is the so-called rule following paradox. I have a feeling it's relevant. If you have or anyone else reading this has any idea what this paradox is, kindly edify me. Thanks.

I wonder if you have closely read any one or more of the following of Witty's writings:

• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
• Philosophical Investigations
• On Certainty
• Culture and Value
• Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics

Many of your questions and criticisms of Witty seem derivative of secondary and tertiary mis/readings of (fragments from) the works listed here.

I wonder if you have closely read any one or more of the following of Witty's writings:

• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
• Philosophical Investigations
• On Certainty
• Culture and Value
• Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics

Many of your questions and criticisms of Witty seem derivative of secondary and tertiary mis/readings of (fragments from) the works listed here. — 180 Proof

I've been outed. :blush:

I've been outed. :blush: — TheMadFool

I'll give you the clues that gave you away:

my hunch is, — TheMadFool

Another Wittgensteinian idea I haven't got a handle — TheMadFool

:ok:

I've been outed. :blush:
— TheMadFool
I'll give you the clues that gave you away:

my hunch is,
— TheMadFool

Another Wittgensteinian idea I haven't got a handle
— TheMadFool

:ok: — Caldwell

Private Language Argument (Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy). Somewhere in that article is a very important sentence that states that no one really understands ol' Ludwig, an oft-repeated warning notice that we should all pay heed to. I'm not alone thought that doesn't comfort me as much as it should I guess. Reminds me of the following quote:

If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics. — Richard Feynman

I guess the classic, albeit maybe exaggerated example is asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin: it's not a question that can gain any traction in the realm of practice: whatever answer one furnishes does not guide or impact upon conduct. Or - to use an Austinian distinction, insofar an answer might matter, it matters as a performative, rather than as a constative: it determines in- and out- groups, it serves as a litmus test for communal bonds (a shibboleth): it's efficacy lies in its form, not it's content, as it were. It is a showing, not a saying. Which is different from say: 'pass me the slab' (which can also serve a performative role qua resisting or acceding to authority say, but is not only that). In any case it's why I'm of the opinion that God is a grammar mistake.

--

Also it is obvious to anyone with a pulse that Mad Fool has never read a word of Wittgenstein and has no intention of doing so. He's a poseur who asks questions whose answers he doesn't give a damn about. That he is literate at all is an open question.

:up:

Also it is obvious to anyone with a pulse that... — StreetlightX

:sweat: You guys are killing me.

This thread should be re-titled The Essence of MadFool because the posts are talking about MadFool.

I can't seem to get my question across, because people keep telling me what I already know. I'll chalk it up to my inability to convey my question in a way that's clear. :smile:

:smirk:

That's roughly my instinct, that theology is a motor spinning alright but not hooked up to a drivetrain; I just don't really trust that instinct. Think for example of how religious belief and the attendant language can be woven into the morality of believers, in their choices, in how they teach their children. It feels arbitrary to deny there is a practice here in which saying this rather than that matters. Maybe the mistake I'm worried about is lumping together all religious speech; there are lots of different sorts of things one might say, that could count as religious, and some of them connect rather clearly to practice and some quite a bit less clearly.

And if we decide, no, there's no language-game here, does that render religious speech nonsense? If a sentence like 'Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead' is nonsense, then presumably it's not just, for instance, false. I can't quite convince myself that sentence doesn't have, and cannot have, a truth-value. It's part of a story, yes, and we're generally not interested in the truth-value of sentences in stories; we're in somewhat different territory when the story is about a real person in a real place. I told someone just today the anecdote about Kurt Gödel's Selective Service form, but then mentioned that I don't know if that story's true. Anyway, I don't find that sequence, [no practice] >> [no language-game] >> [no meaning] >> [no truth-value] entirely convincing.

let the thing tell us how to grasp it with its ordinary criteria
— Antony Nickles

The word "its" there is odd, though, isn't it? Why isn't it, "our ordinary criteria"? — Srap Tasmaner

That's a good point. I said it to emphasize the fact that each thing, like knowing, believing, pointing, has different criteria and grammar than others--say, not everything submits to true/false statements, or that knowledge works differently about pain than it does about objects. I did not want to differentiate that criteria are the thing's criteria, rather than ours. I feel like any attempts to force the question of ownership would miss that things and us and criteria are all wrapped up together in our lives (we'd get trapped into a subject/object picture).

We cling to the aspiration for the ideal
— Antony Nickles
* * *
I think language is inherently idealizing, and when we talk about it, we're idealizing the idealizing already there...." — Srap Tasmaner

I would say that language has the possibility to lead to problems, one reason is that words have definitions individually, so when we put them together we imagine a sentence has meaning in the same way. But if you look at the way Witt describes the interlocutor, it is the person creating the picture, language is only the means of our bewitchment.

When we believe that we must find that order, must find the ideal, in our actual language, we become dissatisfied with what are ordinarily called "propositions", "words", "signs". — Witt, PI #105

when [Witt] describes the language-game in which an Important Word has its 'original home' (was that the phrase?) [yes** -A.N.], is not a use devoid of idealization, but how idealization works, and how it can be used to do work. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree with the sentiment here, but we are not so much "idealizing", as searching for understanding, truth, depth, breadth, clarity, a sense of solidity, progress; that we still want to understand the world, and, with language in its ordinary uses, we have traction to look into what interests us, what is essential about something, only that we no longer impose the criteria for its "essence".

When philosophers use a word a “knowledge”, “being”, “object”, “I”, “proposition/sentence”, “name” a and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language in which it is at [**] home? What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. — Witt, PI #116

I'm not convinced by this "clinging" image, or by pointing the finger at our "desire" for certainty, as if the trouble is some psychological quirk. — Srap Tasmaner

I wouldn't dismiss it as quirky, or psychological (if that is to mean the position humans are in does not matter in our search for truth), but that Witt is talking about the human condition. The wish to exclude the human from the equation is the step (desire) to abstract to criteria that lead to certainty. The voice of the interlocutor is at times desperate, emphatic, worried, absorbed, tempted, etc. The desire I mention is the "must" in the following:

We want to say that there can't be any vagueness in logic. The idea now absorbs us, that the ideal 'must' be found in reality. Meanwhile we do not as yet see how it occurs there, nor do we understand the nature of this "must". We think it must be in reality; for we think we already see it there. — Witt, PI #101

Update

The Rule-Following Paradox

This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because any course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

1. There's a rule: Anything goes (the rule is never violated)
2. There's no rule: Anything goes (there is no rule to violate)

There's a rule = There's no rule

This is the rule-following paradox.

If meaning is use and use is completely arbitrary there are no rules. There's no essence to ground meaning, a rule for word usage. Hence, if someone claims there is a rule then that rule is basically do whatever the hell you want...with words that is.

Short language in grammar games no Wittgenstienian have!

Words have definitions;
— Antony Nickles

You so sure? Perhaps, so long as you don't mistake the definition for the use, or for the meaning. — Banno

To, clarify: words can be defined, as in, they have that possibility, unlike sentences.

why this is the statement that he feels he needs to make, such as that, say, my categorizing our relationship with pain as expression takes away having something fixed and constant about ourselves.
— Antony Nickles

I suppose it's taking away or not mentioning self-awareness, or more precisely in this specific case of pain, it takes away or does not mention our capacity for introspection (conscious perception of sensations from inside the body) of pain. In short: pain is an MIS for the body, a carrier of information that can be reliably acquired, consciously examined and thus in some measure known and recognised as such by the subject. — Olivier5

I specifically said that knowledge in this case is its sense as awareness (thus sometimes it can not be "reliably acquired" as we are not aware of it, have repressed our pain). And to say "in some measure known" is to be aware of it (in me) and to express (to you). None of this is the sense of knowledge like that of an object.

We cling to the aspiration for the ideal but simply accept that we only "approximate" it, are "relativistic" to it.
— Antony Nickles

What else can we do than try and approach truth? — Olivier5

The point here is there is not an essence of a thing (like an object) which we know in the same way as everything else. So, epistemologically, everything has a different way it is judged (even outside of knowledge), and, for some of them, it is not truth, or an ideal, or certainty. We nevertheless have ordinary criteria to judge what interests us about it, what is essential about it to us (all).

Grant that it is pointless to say, 'i know I have a headache'; is there also something wrong with saying that? Is it, as some suggest, having read LW, a misuse of the word 'know'? — Srap Tasmaner

Consistency.

The language game of "knowing that such-and-such" involves being able to justify the claim.

No justification can be given in "I know I have a headache".

Hence, it is a different game.

Is it a misuse? It would be if, for instance, you then decided that since you could not justify the headache, you were mistaken, or if you did not take appropriate remedial measures because of your lack of knowledge. You would have reached the wrong conclusion as a result of a grammatical error.

If you're right people should be saying things like "I have a headache" or "I have a stomachache" even when they don't. After all, according to you, no reasoning is involved. People complain of pain because they are in pain. — TheMadFool

A trivial criticism. Reasons are not causes. After all, according to me, no reasoning is involved, but People complain of pain because they are in pain.

True I can't demonstrate my pain to another but surely I must to myself. However, we have to be careful to distinguish between going through pain and knowing pain. The former is a direct kind of experience (you just have pain) but the latter which involves finding the right word for the experience requires reasoning (you know you have pain). — TheMadFool

You don't demonstrate to your self that you have a pain - you just have a pain. You've renewed @Isaac's point that there is ratiocination involved in borderline cases, such as choosing "pain" or "itch". It's not relevant here since the same argument applies to itch as to pain. You can't correctly be said to know you have an itch.

By grammar, my hunch is, Wittgenstein is talking about the rules of a given language game. However none of the articles I read on Wittgenstein's theory gives any information on what that actually looks like? What's your take on this matter? — TheMadFool

Bah. The PI is full of examples. A language game is pretty much a use of language as part of an activity. Any sort of finessing is going to get mired in the muck.

@Srap Tasmaner

It seems weird to refer to language-games without reference to correctness, and it seems self-sealing. I can always say someone else's language-game isn't a language-game, because the word is not doing anything. And, in many cases this can be demonstrated, but in other cases, it's not an easy thing to do. Does this mean that there are cases that will never be resolved? Maybe that's just what it means. Is that just the nature of language. It seems to be. This is the point about my post. — Sam26

Maybe it would help with some examples. Let's say, making an apology. Now, I can judge that what someone else is saying is not an apology, but I would probably ask: "Was that supposed to be an apology? You don't even sound sorry!" But this is not to say it is doing, nothing. And Austin would say they did not pull it off, not that it was "incorrect" (that correctness is not the criteria). And we can say that, e.g., an apology is not the correct, as in appropriate, thing to say if we didn't do it; that we should offer an excuse instead, but it is hard to see in what sense we would argue that excuses are not correct in themselves, as a practice.

But another example might be, say, making a claim for justice. Now the implications (the workings) of such a claim is to call into question what is just, and so to say their words do nothing is not just to say they are not making a correct claim (or making it incorrectly, say, by using violence), but to deny them access to justice. We are now in the moral realm where what we decide to do is based on who we are willing to be--this is the way that works--so, yes, this case may never be resolved, but it is not the nature of language, but our human condition.

So the essence of (what is essential about) a "language-game" (AKA, Witt's term: concept)--the criteria for judgment in it or of it, what interests us about it, its "grammar", may not be correctness (or even rule-based).

I agreed with oyur post, but with some caution.

There has to be some criteria by which we judge correctness here. And yet, nothing is definitive. — Sam26

The criteria is not necessarily stated; but it can be shown by continuing on in the appropriate way.
Hence back to :

The rule is ultimately seen in our following it or going against it, Rather than in saying it. The use, not the rule, is the final arbiter.
We add and subtract from the rules. Consider castling, or en passant. A key aspect of a family resemblance is recognising a new cousin, perhaps with not qualities in common with yourself, as a member of your family. (@TheMadFool)
And our language games come together as a form of life. That is, they interact with each other, and with themselves - recursively. hanaH — Banno

The Rule-Following Paradox — TheMadFool

If you don't get a stronger grasp of the discussion here, you will drown when you meet Kripkenstein. Better to keep your distance.

If meaning is use and use is completely arbitrary there are no rules. There's no essence to ground meaning, a rule for word usage. Hence, if someone claims there is a rule then that rule is basically do whatever the hell you want...with words that is. — TheMadFool

Wrong way. It's just that we feel we need to state the rule in order to follow it, but the proof is in the following. Making the rules explicit just encourages rule-breakers.

I specifically said that knowledge in this case is its sense as awareness (thus sometimes it can not be "reliably acquired" as we are not aware of it, have repressed our pain). And to say "in some measure known" is to be aware of it (in me) and to express (to you). None of this is the sense of knowledge like that of an object. — Antony Nickles

What is the sense of "knowledge like that of an object"?

You mean a physical object ? Because I can chose my pain as an object of my attention, so a pain can be an object in that original sense of the word, just like anything else. And I believe that my pain can be known in the exact same sense that any other object can be known: perceived via the senses and explained rationally by the intellect.

The point here is there is not an essence of a thing (like an object) which we know in the same way as everything else — Antony Nickles

Again, rather unclear. How do we know about things, if not via our awareness of them? If you are not aware of any apple, can you know anything about apples?

To, clarify: words can be defined, as in, they have that possibility, unlike sentences. — Antony Nickles

Hmm. A small point, but I won't agree with you on this. I don't think there is such a strong difference in kind between sentences and words. One might set out the meaning of a sentence, in a way not dissimilar to setting out the meaning of a word in a dictionary, by giving a synonymous sentence. But a dictionary of sentences would be impossibly long...

But moreover, the definition of a word is an attempt to explicate the rules for it's use, and hence must fail through incompleteness.

@Banno

Another Wittgensteinian idea I haven't got a handle on is the so-called rule following paradox. — TheMadFool

This is really one you have to read with the larger context of the whole discussion of rule-following, but I did another discussion of Cavell's critique of Kripke's reading of Witt as relying on rules (rather than investigating them as an example), instead of drawing out each thing's criteria, so maybe this topic goes there. But Cavell looks at the "paradox" as the same as Witt's imagining of a "private language"--that the "paradox" is between the nature of rules needing interpretation, endlessly, and our desire to be certain that if we follow this rule we will be correct (right), rather than looking at each thing as having different criteria (even different types).

@Banno

By grammar, my hunch is, Wittgenstein is talking about the rules of a given language game. However none of the articles I read on Wittgenstein's theory gives any information on what that actually looks like? What's your take on this matter? — TheMadFool

It might save time to find the phrase "Essence is expressed by grammar" on the first page and see if that post makes sense. But I would say the criteria for judgement rather than rules, as rules are not always our criteria.

Update

Wittgenstein's Ladder

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Dsp skzliwl wqstm qpiterd!


I feel like a...

... like a 'numerologist' yammering on about ZFC. :sweat: