Well the plague doesn't exist any more so disease is not really an issue either see.

But honestly, why is anyone talking about right-wing terrorism and not right-wing state power? The growth of the right-wing is not confined to a couple of murderous hicks but to murderous apparatuses of power that are growing all across the West. Has anyone here even noticed the results of the latest EU elections? Probably not because Americans are shit and ignorant. Brasil and Balsonaro? Turkey and Edrogan? India and Modi? Had everyone missed the enshrinement of conservative agenda into law all across the States itself? Right-wing terrorism? Try the terrorism rainined down upon immigrant families trapped in dog cages at the border, sanctioned by nothing less than government power. Try the terrorism enacted upon women's bodies by old White men in the South. Try the terrorism visited upon the poor by the utter destruction of social mobility via officially sanctioned legislation all across the world.

Should one be so lucky as to only have to deal with random and sporadic outbursts of violence and not the massive, suffocating power of the state.

Ooh its just black people. Whole bunch of poor people too. That's OK then.

Ok buddy.

No other comparable country is even in the ballpark of murderousness as the US when it comes to firearms; it is a distinctly, disgustingly American problem:


source


source

“How can you feel safe in the UK walking around without a gun?” — I like sushi

I've been asked this in Australia by an American as well. I found it an insane question.

No, I mean none of these. You don't have a handle on what you're talking about. The distinctions you draw are wrong. The questions you ask are ill formed. Enough. You're not worth dialogue.

I never disputed that language-games are not real in their own context and way of being. I only posited that the science language-game has a quality of cashing out certain outcomes, and this indicates patterns of nature are real. — schopenhauer1

Meaningless.

Yes but that would be silly.

*shrug*. I like ostracizing racists. I enjoy supporters of paedophilia being denied their jobs. I like bigots being shamed into depression and the occasional suicide. These are social Goods.

'Just words'. Oh dear.

These people. They claim to value speech. So long as it remains toothless. They don't care one jot for speech. They want to suck it dry.

lmao.

Like "you're fired". Speech.

People want free speech without concequences, apparently.

What I think the significance can possibly be is pointing to a realism- a metaphysical indicator that there are structures to the world that are real — schopenhauer1

And my point is that every language-game does this. I've said this multiple times now. I'll not say it again. You have a very shallow view of language-games as being nothing but 'conventions' or 'social pragmatic discourse' or whatever: terms which are not used by Witty, and which are often projected onto him by those who have not read his work. Language-games are 'real' through and through, and everytime you keep try and institute a dichotomy between 'mere' language-games and 'math-informed science' as turning upon 'hitting a reality' or whatever, you misunderstand language-games. Put 'conventions' in the trash bin of your mind; where they - and talk of 'social' and 'cultural' - belong. Also forget 'usefulness', language-games are not useful-for-x; language-games have uses is all; they are defined by their uses; whether those uses are themselves 'useful' for survival or not is irrelevant, and every time you speak in those terms you betray - again - your misunderstandings.

Start talking in terms of grammar and criteria, and then maybe you'll have something of relevance to say.

Simply just another language-game like passing the salt, or is there something different about this language-game? — schopenhauer1

There is 'something different' about every language-game. Every language-game has a purpose or a point to which it is keyed, and there are as many language-games as they there are purposes to them, without which they would not be language-games. This is such an important point that Witty's emphasis on the varying kinds of language-games - the fact that they differ by kind, and not merely by degree - is placed right at the very start of the PI, and governs everything that follows in the book. That there might be such a difference in kind between the language-games that existed at some supposed break between the various revolutions you speak of (predictably lumped together like so many dead fish, as you lump math, logic and science together, utterly gutting any conceptual cogency each might have) is not an argument against the scope of language-games, but an elementality built right into their definition.

Oh not at all, I too, consider overreactions to equine homophobia to be an existential threat to Western Civilisation. It is a Very Important Problem.

This formalized form of logic, however, provided insights to predicitions about the natural world that were accurate, and technology that was vastly more complex than what came before. — schopenhauer1

'More complex'; ' immensely ratcheted up capacities'; 'something different': these are all so many ways of saying nothing at all: what complexity? What kind of capacity? What 'something different'? Merely insisting on some kind of Very Important Difference - and that is all you've done - is to insist on nothing. You've given no conceptual substance to any of these apparent 'differences', other than beg the question and insist that language-games 'cannot capture real patterns of nature'. And this despite the fact that such 'capturing' is just the sine qua non of language-games as such. As if passing the salt is something unreal.

Ah yes, the mass persecution of equine homophobia. A perfectly reasonable account for the for the rise of the right.

How is it that the language-game of science "hit upon" the technological complexities it has? — schopenhauer1

The same way the language-games of literally anything else 'hits upon' the 'realities' they are adequate to. It's as if someone were to ask: 'how is it that 'block!' 'hits upon' this block here such that the builder will pass it to me? What a mystery!'; a mystery, sure, to anyone who does not understand what a language-game is. One lesson here is: no language-game is 'mere', is sufficient unto itself: every language-game is constrained and made possible by the realities out of which it is born and is addressed to. This is as true of one asking to pass the salt as it is of one asking to measure the velocity of light.

So this insistance - made with no argument and substantiated by the most flimsy of suppositions - that the language-games of science (now further illigitimately assimilated for no apparent reason into math and logic, out of nowhere) do something other than any other langauge-games simply rings hollow and false. It falsifies not only the concept of language-games, but also the operations of math, logic, and now, apparently, science. As if we did not make predictions until the advent of math. As if we could not invent before the formalizations of logic. Rubbish.

I couldn't care less, you're wasting my time.

One can construe Witt's metaphysics of these language-games to be be in purely nominalist or conventionalist terms. — schopenhauer1

No, one can't, that's my point: that it's a total, utter misreading to think this. One might put the point this way: the PI stands as one of the most rigorous meditations on the force of necessity in language ever written, and to think that this force is somehow missing in the construal of language-games is to misunderstand them entirely. Forget this shallow focus on 'culture' and 'convention', again words that barely appear in the PI. Langauge-games only exist to the degree that they lay down roots in the world; they do not exist as a thin film pulled over it.

This particular language-game did something different than other language games. — schopenhauer1

But this is false, an untruth - at least in the terms proposed in your post. Witty's entire point is that our use of language, to the degree that one can mean anything at all with it, is saturated with nothing other than 'predictions and concepts in the world that work'; we 'technologized' and 'predicted' long before we had math at hand, and were we to lose every work of math and every mathematician to a fire tomorrow, we would go on predicting, inventing, and putting language to work regardless. Nothing in language would work - or would do work for us, would mean anything - unless at every point it 'hit upon real metaphysical patterns of nature'. Witty's complaint against philosophy is precisely that it doesn't register such 'hits', although Witty would not call them 'metaphysical', but simply, everyday.

I would also make note of your continual conflation between math and logic, which ought to alone disqualify everything you write, but I doubt you care. Here's an idea - follow along and contribute to the reading group, rather than waltzing in with your preconceived ideas and prior, unrelated concerns.

WP - Right Wing Violence is on the Rise

The Rise of Right Wing Extremism in the US

Economist: Right Wing Terrorism on the Rise in the West

Right Wing Violence rising in the US

New Yorker: It is time to confront right wing terrorism

CBC: Extremist groups and hate crimes growing in Canada

"In the past 10 years when you look at murders committed by domestic extremists in the United States of all types, right-wing extremists are responsible for about 74 percent of those murders," Pitcavage says. — Izat So

B-b-b-b-ut I can't make tasteless jokes anymore and that's the most important thing!

§134

Thus begin's Witty's explicit attack on the 'general form of the propositon', identified in the TLP as 'This is how things are'. The first thing he points out is that 'this is how things are' doesn't actaully say anything about the world, as it were; instead, it points to, or rather 'stands for some statement or other' which does say something about the world (e.g. "the cat is on the mat").

In other words, while "the cat is on the mat" might 'agree' (or not) with reality, 'This is how things are' can do neither because on its own, it's simply an incomplete sentence. One has to supply the 'content' of 'this' for it to do so; in the absence of that content, it is simply a placeholder, and a placeholder can neither agree (or disagree) with reality. This is why it is what Witty calls a 'propositional schema'. One has to supply the 'content' of 'this' for it to do so, otherwise it's agreement or not with reality is 'obvious nonsense'.

Some relevant passages from Stanley Cavell Claim of Reason, which I've been quoting incessantly, which might be useful here:

On necessity:

"It is not necessary that human beings should have come to engage in anything we would call calculation (inferring, etc.). But if their natural history has brought them to this crossroads, then only certain procedures will count as calculating (inferring, etc.) and only certain forms will allow those activities to proceed. It is not necessary that the members of a group should ever have found pleasure and edification in gathering together to hear the stories of their early history related; but if they do, then only certain kinds of stories, in certain structures, will provide (what we can comprehend as) that pleasure and edification. "There must be agreement not only in definitions but also . . . in judgements. This seems to abolish logic, but does not do so."

In particular, I take it: It is not necessary that we should recognize anything as "logical inference"; but if we do, then only certain procedures will count as drawing such inferences, ones (say) which achieve the universality of agreement, the teachability, and the individual conviction, of the forms of inference we accept as logic. There is no logical explanation of the fact that we (in general, on the whole) will agree that a conclusion has been drawn, a rule applied, an instance to be a member of a class, one line to be a repetition of another (even though it is written lower down, or in another hand or color); but the fact is, those who understand (i.e., can talk logic together) do agree. And the fact is that they agree the way they agree; I mean, the ways they have of agreeing at each point, each step.

... Wittgenstein's view of necessity is, as one would expect, internal to his view of what philosophy is. His philosophy provides, one might say, an anthropological, or even anthropomorphic, view of necessity; and that can be disappointing; as if it is not really necessity which he has given an anthropological view of. As though if the a priori has a history it cannot really be the a priori in question. - "But something can be necessary whatever we happen to take as, or believe to be, necessary." - But that only says that we have a (the) concept of necessity - for it is part of the meaning of that concept that the thing called necessary is beyond our control.

If the wish were not mere father but creator of the deed, we would have no such concept. If upon doing a calculation I could wish, and my wish bring it about, that the figures from which I "started" become altered, if necessary, in order that the result of my calculation prove correct; and if I could wish, and my wish bring it about, that the world alter where necessary so that the altered figures are still of what they are supposed to be; then the sense of necessity (standing over myself, at any rate) is not likely to be very strong in me. What we take to be necessary in a given period may alter. It is not logically impossible that painters should now paint in ways which outwardly resemble paintings of the Renaissance, nor logically necessary that they now paint in the ways they do. What is necessary is that, in order for us to have the form of experience we count as an experience of a painting, we accept something as a painting. And we do not know a priori what we will accept as such a thing. But only someone outside such an enterprise could think of it as a manipulation or exploration of mere conventions"

On Convention:

"The conventions we appeal to may be said to be "fixed", "adopted", "accepted", etc. by us; but this does not now mean that what we have fixed or adopted are (merely) the (conventional) names of things. The conventions which control the application of grammatical criteria are fixed not by customs or some particular concord or agreement which might, without disrupting the texture of our lives, be changed where convenience suggests a change. (Convenience is one aspect of convention, or an aspect of one kind or level of convention.)

They are, rather, fixed by the nature of human life itself, the human fix itself, by those "very general facts of nature" which are "unnoticed only because so obvious", and, I take it, in particular, very general facts of human nature - such, for example, as the fact that the realization of intention requires action, that action requires movement, that movement involves consequences we had not intended, that our knowledge (and ignorance) of ourselves and of others depends upon the way our minds are expressed (and distorted) in word and deed and passion; that actions and passions have histories.

... That human beings on the whole do not respond in these ways is, therefore, seriously referred to as conventional; but now we are thinking of convention not as the arrangements a particular culture has found convenient, in terms of its history and geography, for effecting the necessities of human existence, but as those forms of life which are normal to any group of creatures we call human, any group about which we will say, for example, that they have a past to which they respond, or a geographical environment which they manipulate or exploit in certain ways for certain humanly comprehensible motives.

Here the array of "conventions" are not patterns of life which differentiate human beings from one another, but those exigencies of conduct and feeling which all humans share. Wittgenstein's discovery, or rediscovery, is of the depth of convention in human life; a discovery which insists not only on the conventionality of human society but, we could say, on the conventionality of human nature itself, on what Pascal meant when he said "Custom is our nature" (Pensees, §89)".

Witt's theory of the foundations of math are similar to that of language, in that he thinks it dissolves once it is shown to be a game of sorts. This is related to no "eternal" philosophical problems, like that of the foundations of math. — schopenhauer1

Oh come on this is the longest of long stretches to stretch. At least be honest and say that you just wondered in here from your own recent concerns and you have zero interest in where the reading group is at.

How can this language game be so useful compared with others, in mining complexity in natural phenomena and in secondarily creating synthetic technologies from those original mined complexities? — schopenhauer1

What is it about language-games that makes you think they are somehow incompatible with this 'usefulness'? Especially since for Witty, all language-games are useful for particular purposes (that's just what language-games are). You mention caprice - but what makes you think language-games are (merely?) capricious or arbitrary? That they are not, that they are keyed at every point to purposes, is maybe the biggest lesson of the PI: language is use in a language-game.

You mention a 'realism to the complexities of these special language-games' - but what makes you think that not every language-game already involves just such a realism which not merely underwrites them, but makes of them language-games at all? That not every language-game is 'special' precisely to the degree that it is as it is for a (necessary (set of)) reason(s)? Witty's whole concern is to show when precisely such a realism is lost, we no longer even have language-games, and with their loss, can no longer mean anything at all.

And I'm ignoring entirely the idea that mathematical Platonism somehow counts as the default 'basis of math': as if it wasn't just one measly contender in a crowded, unstable field.

Three points: First, does your post have anything to do with the passages we're currently reading? If so, which passages? If not, why are you posting here? Second, what is the 'basis for rules of math' that Wittgenstein supposedly 'dissolves'? You've said nothing about it, so I don't know what you're referring to. Third, one of Witty's 'major theses', as you put it, is precisely that language-games take their relevance from the forms-of-life from which they arise, so I don't see why you think the concept of language-games (to say nothing of 'social convention' - a phrase that appears not a single time in the PI, despite you naming it as a 'major thesis') might be in some way disabling of an evolutionary reading of language. Your post simply makes the assumption that they are incompatible, but I don't see any argument to that effect. So there's some implict understanding of Wittgenstein at work in your post, but you've not spelled it out, and so it cannot be engaged.

Sophisticat is right that this thread is nothing but an appeal to incredulity.

:up:

"[One must] reject the common sop that somehow the indeterminism of quantum physics helps us out here. First, there is no evidence that the neurons of the brain are subject to indeterminancy in the way, say, firing of elections is (and in fact there is much evidence against it); even if that were the case, however ... the indeterminancy of some outcomes in the brain would not help with establishing personal causal origination of actions. For randomness in fact would make us more rather than less subject to unexpected turns of fact. ...

Moreover, human free choice would not be made possible by neuronal randomness in any case (and all the evidence so far seems to be against it) because no conscious human choice could ever operate to refashion neural networks directly at the neuronal level. Neural networks change through experience, not through will. ... We do not have direct access to neurons and their patterns of firing any more than we have the capacity for direct intervention into the functioning of our liver, even if the liver sometimes were to function randomly". (Heidi Ravven, The Self Beyond Itself)

Is the OP anything more than a linguistic quibble? It reads: 'people call life this. I think we should call life that instead'. But then, nothing is said about the concept of life at all: just a matter of personal preference. And a strange, idiosyncratic one at that. What philosophy is being debated here, other than 'this is what I like to call things and think people should also call things like I do'? There are no stakes to the OP. If one were to agree, or disagree, nothing about our understanding of the world, or of life would change. Only our understanding of how we are to use langauge. Trivial.

§133

§133 can be read as a conclusion to the whole section that began around §88 or so, and it does so by bringing out the stakes of much of the discussion so far. I want to approach this in light of what I said previously about comparisons only being available at a local level: it's in this respect that I understand the comment that: "A method is now demonstrated by examples, and the series of examples can be broken off". This is because a local-to-local comparison of grammar does not generalise: local-to-local comparisons - which must always involve examples of language-in-use - shed mutual light on each other (ie. with respect to the specificity of the language-games involved, along with their grammar, and according to the forms-of-life which grant them relevancy), but they don’t ever (can’t ever, according to Witty) amount to (or lead to) a ‘theory of language’ as a whole.

The comparisons between language-games shed light on those language-games, but not, as it were, language in general. This is why ‘the series of examples can be broken off’: the comparison of examples can only go so far, before you literally start running out of material: forms-of-life and the grammar appropriate to them only extend so far, and no further. This is in contrast to the philosophical impulse to generalise (in the blue books, Witty famously laments philosophy’s “craving for generality”) and take examples as merely standing for tokens of universilizablity; to make a philosophical problem ‘disappear’, in this sense, is to make note of the local specificity of a language-game; to note where it can, and cannot be applicable, and where and when it starts to stray too far from the form-of-life which gives it it’s sense.

This is why one can “break off philosophising” when one wants to: insofar as ‘philosophical problems’ are always those of an inappropriate generalization, merely noting that inappropriateness simply 'returns words to their everyday use’ (§116), from which philosophy is always a deviation. And having done this, one no longer, as it were, needs to philosophise: the philosophical problems ‘completely disappear’. All this also accounts for why Witty here insists on the plurality of problems (“problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem"): insofar as problems are always local, they are also always specific: there are no ‘eternal’ philosophical problems, just philosophical problems brought about by the inappropriate extension or extrapolation of a language-game beyond its bounds of applicability. And this is always a case-by-case issue.

—

Woo! Glad we got through this section. It’s easily my least favourite of the PI, and from here on out for the next few sections, Witty will be addressing what he calls the ‘general form of the proposition’, introduced in §65 but taken up here in an explicit manner. It continues his self-critique of the TLP, in which such a ‘general form’ was one of Witty’s most important concepts (TLP 5.471: "The general propositional form is the essence of a proposition”). It will be useful to keep this in mind while reading the next few sections.

§132

The distinction drawn here between 'an' order and 'the' order ('in our knowledge of the use of language'), maps, I like to think, onto the distinction I previously drew between 'surveying' grammar (§122) either locally and globally. In those terms, one can put the point like this: because there is, and therefore can be, no globally applicable grammar to cover all uses of language, the only comparisons we can make are between distinct local grammars. In other words, there can only be local-to-local comparisons, and not local-to-global comparisons.

This is one reason why the accent here is placed on 'distinctions' (and not similarities; compare §130: "the language-games stand there as objects of comparison which, through similarities and dissimilarities"). "Our ordinary forms of language ... make us overlook" these distinctions, because we tend to take language to have a global grammar that is applicable everywhere - philosophy, in particular, is prone to this mistake.

Now, what lends every 'local' grammar it's flavour, is, of course, the use to which it is put (building something, naming something, giving directions, etc). Each of these 'practical' forms-of-life will employ a different kind of grammar, corresponding to the language-games appropriate to them. 'Language in idle' is what happens when we abstract language-games from those forms-of-life, and treat grammar as being globally consistent across all of language.

Some favourites (psychoanalytically inclined):

Alenka Zupancic - What is Sex?
Paul Verhaeghe - Does the Woman Exist?
Mari Ruti - The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects

Stanley Cavell - Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome
Sara Ellenbogen - Wittgenstein's Account of Truth
Peter Winch - The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy

Oh, this reminds me! Eleni Ikoniadou, who presents the sixth seminar in your link, also has an OK book on rhythm, The Rhythmic Event, which takes a look at alot of sound art through the lens of rhythm, and is pretty useful and well written.

I believe it opens to the last comment you've seen in that thread. So if there've been 2 pages of new comments since you last visited a 9 page thread, it will open on page 7.

Questions about the so-called 'efficacy' of formal systems of inference mongering I suppose.

People who ask this kind of question tend to forget - or are rather completely unfamiliar with - just how much junk math and junk logic are out there. Math and logic that, were one to attempt to 'apply' it to the world, would be both completely useless or utterly wrong. In fact the majority of math and logic is like this, and its only a tiny sliver that, only after arduous efforts of fine tuning and trial and error, ever gets used at all. Part of the problem is that very few people who like to talk about this stuff actually study either, and all they hear about are the success.

It's as if one were to tune into the radio and remark that, based on your extensive sampling of radio, there seem to be alot of musical acts worthy of getting played on the radio. But of course you don't hear about the failures - precisely because they are failures. And math and logic is full of utter rubbish which we disregard for the same reasons. @Andrew M's point speaks to this quite nicely.

There's surprisingly very little written about rhythm from a philosophical perspective - at least, as an explicit theme. One work I really like was Jessica Wiskus' The Rhythm of Thought: Art, Literature, and Music after Merleau-Ponty. Although it's strictly speaking a work on M-P, it stands on its own as a great meditation on rhythm in general.

It's like being astonished that a glove just happens to have five fingers. — Banno

:ok:

Yes yes everyone's read M&V. But it doesn't take the sting out of the tail of Levinas' critique.