Ah yes, the old "I haven't seen it so it can't be true" excuse; coupled, no less, with the vapid "I don't look because I don't do politics anyway". Outhouse thinking for outhouse thinkers.

Exactly. The whole idea that reacting politically to an event like that is somehow taboo is incredibly stupid. Of course one ought to have a political reaction to it; it calls for political response - otherwise one is left with 'thought and prayers' or whatever useless shit Americans like to do.

Are you using "anthropological use" differently from "empirical use", or are these the same? — Luke

The same. After all, Witty consistently and repeatedly stresses that what he has to say has nothing to do with discovering new facts, nothing to do with the empirical, and bears entirely on the understanding. He says this, over and over.

On the one hand you say that everyday use has "nothing to do with" the empirical use, i.e., excludes the empirical use. — Luke

To say that everyday use has nothing to do with empirical use is not to exclude it. Putting it in the language of set theory might help: latter falls under the extension of the former but has nothing to do with its intension. For reference, in case you're unfamiliar: https://www.britannica.com/topic/intension

Yep. Anthropological uses of language largely happen to fall under the rubric of everyday use, but the latter is not at all defined by or in relation to the former at all. Conceptually, the two are entirely distinct.

has excluded its actual use by real people? — Luke

But I haven't at all 'excluded' that anthropological use; on the contrary, I see Witty as including that and more. The everyday use that Witty speaks of is more general than anthropological use; anthropological uses are (largely) instances of everyday use, but the equation the two is a complete disaster of reading.

Street, what do you think is outside of Luke's conception of 'everyday language' that he's not accounted for? — fdrake

Novelty, invention, creativity: basically all the richness of language and our abilities to make use of it. The anthropological reading turns Witty into some shitty conservative of language, a taxidermist who'd like to stuff it and keep its dead remains as is. But as I said previously, it utterly ignores the last hundred pages of the book: it takes the phrase 'everyday use' entirely out of the context of its employment and reads into it a banality that is nowhere prepared for in any remark that comes previous to it.

The everyday is far richer and far more interesting than you give it credit for. Witty understood that.

The anthropological reading trivializes everything Witty has to say. It's worse than useless, and ignores the entire development of the book up to this point.

It would also be utterly, hilariously, falsifiable - every half-wit knows that there are plenty of words that mean things that are not (yet?) in dictionaries; most idiots can even make up words with meanings that make perfect sense that have never been heard before. If the PI meant even less than that, it's only value would be as the ash at the bottom of a fire.

Eh, i don't think either of us are going to particularly budge on this. I'll settle for noting that the idea of 'improper meaning' simply appears nowhere on any page of the PI.

§116

So, this is a fun one if only because I think it's one of the most misunderstood - and widely quoted - bits of the PI. It also helps to bring to a head much of what has been discussed so far.

Everything about §116 turns on how to understand the phrase 'everyday use' and (paraphrased) 'home language'. Here's what I think the common - and disastrously bad - mistake of reading this is: that we need to 'return' words to how they are used in actual, real life communities of speakers. One might call this the anthropological reading. This reading of §116 makes it as though we simply need to conduct a poll among speakers, ask them something like 'do you use the word X in this way, in your everyday life?', and then approve or disapprove of a use of a word based on the answer to this imagined poll.

This reading is awful. It disregards everything that has preceded this section, which makes every effort to distinguish between facts and logic, empiricism and ideality, while explicitly making clear that the investigations within bear upon the latter of each pair (logic, ideality). Explicitly:

§89: "[our investigations] shouldn’t concern itself whether things actually happen in this or that way... as if to this end we had to hunt out new facts; it is, rather, essential to our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it".
§81: "Logic does not treat of language - or of thought - in the sense in which natural science treats of a natural phenomenon".
§109: "Our considerations must not be scientific ones."
§109: "The problems are solved, not by coming up with new discoveries, but by assembling what we have long been familiar with".

The idea that to 'bring words back ... to their everyday use' means 'bringing them back to how they are in fact used by empirical communities of speakers' (as might be discovered) by conducting a poll contravenes all of the above. Witty's investigation is not an anthropology of language which seeks to return words back to their anthropological use, in contrast to their 'metaphysical use'. The sense of 'everyday' that Witty employs is not the same as '(actually) used daily'.

--

So - If not this, then what? What is an 'everyday use' if not an empirical use of language in an anthropological setting? Well, look first to its contrast: the 'ideal' or 'metaphysical' use that Witty has just spent the last 100 pages detailing and arguing against: the key to this 'metaphysical' use of language has to do with its normative content: the sense of how language 'ought' (§39), 'should', 'must' (§66, 97, 98, 101) or 'has to' (§112) be - to do with requiring (§107) something of language, and striving (§98) after that ideal, towards which language must 'aim at' (§91).

The 'metaphysical use of language' imagines that there is an essence/ideal of language which the actual use of language must/ought/should conform to. By contrast, the everyday use of language is any use of language which does not have this requirement. That's it. In this sense, the 'everyday use of language' is primarily defined negatively: a use of language which does not make it strive after an ideal. It is what we might call a subtractive view of language: language minus something, not language plus something (cf. the later comments on Witty's 'ground clearing' - §118).

All of which is to say, once again, that the 'everyday use' of language has nothing to do with an empirical use of language. This is the significance of the sharp distinction drawn between 'understanding' and 'fact' that was previously stressed (§89: "We do not seek to learn anything new by it [our investigations]. We want to understand something that is already in plain view.")

That should be plenty to chew on.

§110-§115

I don't like these sections at all, and find them more ranty than substantial. The thematics we've come across before in more interesting contexts rear their head again although in far more a flaky manner: illusions of depth, the mistake of uniqueness, false appearances of essence, the way in which we are 'impressed' by these illusions, etc. One interesting connection to be made - I think these remarks actually shed light on one of the more enigmatic passages earlier in the PI, namely, §38:

"Naming seems to be a strange connection of a word with an object. - And such a strange connection really obtains, particularly when a philosopher tries to fathom the relation between name and what is named by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name, or even the word “this”, innumerable times. For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. And then we may indeed imagine naming to be some remarkable mental act, as it were the baptism of an object. And we can also say the word “this” to the object, as it were address the object as “this” a a strange use of this word, which perhaps occurs only when philosophizing."

It was hard - for me anyway - to get a clear sense of these comments at the time, but the sections here (§110-§115 and its neighbours) make certain things about it clear, I think. Specifically, the 'strange connection' and 'repetitive staring' has to do with the (illusion) of uniqueness, first mentioned in §93, in contrast to the (reality) of diversity, or what Witty thematizes under the rubric of 'family resemblances'. The 'repetition' here has to do, I think, with trying and (importantly) failing to 'see' the (apparently hidden) 'essence' of language. It's a kind of repetition compulsion, in the Freudian sense of repeating failure in order to try and 'work through' it:

§113: “But this is how it is ---- ” I say to myself over and over again
§114: "That is the kind of proposition one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing nature over and over again..."
§115: "language seemed only to repeat it to us inexorably."

So the key conceptual link - as I understand it - is that between uniqueness (or 'remarkableness') and repetition, and how the illusion of the former gives rise to the fixation of the later. It might be said that 'philosophy', for Witty, just is a pathological repetition compulsion in the psychoanalytic sense. Another important connection that begins to be linked here is that between uniqueness and 'generality': although Witty has invoked (critically) the notion of generality before (esp. the 'general form of the proposition' - cf. §65, §74, §104). Also interesting - and significant - that Witty primarily employs perceptual and specifically visual metaphors (something @fdrake already pointed out):

§113: "If only I could fix my gaze absolutely sharply on this fact and get it into focus".
§115: "A picture held us captive". ; Note the connection with earlier sections:
§90: "We feel as if we had to see right into phenomena"

Can't yet expound on why this insistence of visuality and pictures is important, other than to simply make note of it at this point.

When I do not understand you then what is the mistake with? — Fooloso4

A mistake in and of comprehension. An inbility to understand something has to do with one's understanding - education, brain capacity - not 'meaning'. One comprehends the meaning mistakenly; not: one comprehends the 'improper meaning'. Mistake qualifies comprehension, not meaning. The fault is with 'us', not meaning. We misunderstand, not 'mismean'. All so many ways of saying the same thing.

Meaning is never - cannot be because a category mistake - improper.

We'll get to 125 soon enough.

but in some cases it is predicated in part on intention. — Fooloso4

Not for Witty, it isn't.

If I am the speaker and you take what I said in the wrong way then what you thought what I said meant was an improper meaning, it was not without meaning. — Fooloso4

Maybe so - but this has nothing to do with the PI. 'Improper meaning' is still an awful locution. One mistakes what is meant, or gets a meaning wrong by doing contrarywise to what is expected: but 'meaning' cannot be qualified as 'proper' or 'improper'. The mistake is not - never is - with 'meaning'.

If you are given safety instructions on how to exit the plane and you thought the instructions meant pull in the window rather than push out the window, then that was not the proper meaning, which means, that was not what you were supposed to do. — Fooloso4

Exactly as Issac said: that you have mistaken the meaning of 'pull' says everything about your inability to understand a meaning, and nothing about meaning, or its 'im/properness'.

In any case, nowhere in the PI is meaning qualified as 'proper' or 'improper'.

Improper meaning would not be the absence of meaning but a meaning that was not what was meant — Fooloso4

I still think it's an improper formulation. Meaning is in no way predicated on intention in Witty, and this includes when it doesn't conform to intention.

From page 34 of this discussion: — Fooloso4

Ah, I missed this. Still alot of catching up to do!

--

Also, to chime in on the post above: the very idea of 'proper and improper' meaning is, I think, a very unfortunate category mistake. There either 'is' meaning or there is not: either what is said has some significance that can be cottoned on to, or there is not. 'Improper meaning' is not a thing.

Yeah, that's the passage I had in mind :grin:

§109

§109 makes good on the distinction - first drawn in §89 - between facts and understanding. Recall:

§89: "Not, however, as if to this end we had to hunt out new facts; it is, rather, essential to our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view".

It's in this sense, that 'our considerations' do not uncover new facts, that they "must not be scientific ones" (§109). They bear, that is, upon what Witty in §89 referred to as 'logic', rather than 'the facts of nature' or 'causal connections'. §109: "Philosophical problems... [are] not empirical problems; but they are solved through an insight into the workings of our language"

And as far as what should happen to that 'logic', or the 'workings of our language' its a case of removing any normative content from it: of getting rid of any 'requirement' (§107) or expectation to which logic ought to aspire to (§101: "The idea now absorbs us that the ideal ‘must’ occur in reality. ... [one] doesn’t understand the nature of this “must”. We think the ideal must be in reality; for we think we already see it there). In removing any aspirations to normativity (to an ideal which logic 'ought to' or 'must' conform to) we are left with only description:

§109: " All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place".

This is why "we may not advance any kind of theory": the 'method' of the investigations is to 'look from close up' at the 'actual' workings of language, and not advance ideas about how it should (the ideal) (Recall the distinction in §107 between the actual and the ideal: "the greater becomes the conflict between it [actual language] and our requirement [the ideal]").

This helps explain the otherwise perhaps enigmatic comments about how "The feeling ‘that it is possible, contrary to our preconceived ideas, to think this or that’ - whatever that may mean - could be of no interest to us": I read this saying that it's not a case of replacing one theory by another, but as displacing 'theory' altogether. Ending, of course, on the (in?)famous definition of philosophy as "a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language." ('Understanding' here being a more 'technical' term for Witty than might often be supposed).

---

Pneuma

Lastly, as a note of interest, I did some quick research on the strange and parenthetical remark about the 'The pneumatic conception of thinking': Witty's understanding of pneuma here seems to be less about 'air', as our modern understanding of it tends to be (Anscombe's translation runs: 'The conception of thought as a gaseous medium') than it has to do with an older meaning related to pneuma as a kind of body, or rather spiritual body: in the ancient understanding, the pneuma was understood to be the medium that allowed communication between body and soul, as might be glimpsed in the cognate phantasm, as a kind of 'substance'.

There's alot more to it, but the 'pneumatic conception of thinking' seems to relate to the idea of thought as being 'substantial', of having a body or scaffolding which is structured as such. Joachim Schulte puts it as such: "The central idea is that the core of language contains a scaffolding of rules whose ("pneumatic") substance is the same as that of our thought." Elsewhere (I lost the link and cbf to find it again), Witty is said to have preferred the word 'ephemeral' to translate 'pneumatische'). In any case, this also links this idea to what Witty elsewhere in the PI criticises as 'spirit' and 'illusion' (again, 'phantasm').

Your interpretations are charming as always, isn't he arguing it's the religion and culture which is inferior and not every practitioner? — Judaka

You're naive in the extreme if you think a person's beliefs and ways of life are not intimately constitutive of who they are, and that comments on the former do not in anyway bear on the latter.

Even if Morrison was saying or encouraging others to say or think that Islam is an inferior culture and religion (isn't this covered by "disliking Islam" how did I get lambasted for that?) he still isn't culpable for an environment which creates mass murderers. He didn't incite violence, he didn't condone violence and you and others like you are just utilising the tragedy to increase the punch of the condemning of a practice you don't like. — Judaka

Correct, I am condemning the murder of 50 people and the conditions which lead to it, as should anyone who isn't a complete wanker. Which includes enablers like Morrison and his dog whistling fuckery. But of course, this isn't a conversation you're capable of having, having proudly flaunted your deliberate ignorance of politics, as though this was not a mark of deep shame. What you say about Morrison has no standing. You kicked your own stool away from yourself.

Do I need to keep quiet any problems I have with any culture and religion? — Judaka

Not at all. All religion should get fucked as far as I'm concerned, including Islam. The problem with the OP isn't that it 'has problems with a culture and religion'; it's that it conceptualizes them in ways so thin and shallow as to be not only useless but actively harmful. Anyone who wants to talk about religion and culture without at the same time talking economics, politics, and social conditions is a priori ruled out of having anything meaningful whatsoever to say. The OP presents a shallow story for piddling minds.

The OP, which is clearly nothing like your list and can be generally summarised as anti-Islamic sentiment. — Judaka

The OP is exactly like 'my list'. It's an effort to encourage a cultural and religious pissing contest where a full one sixth of the human population is declared inferior on the back of a destructive caricature that feeds the very flames it decries. It's as bullshit as any claim my wanker of a PM has ever uttered.

What do you think the relationship between Australian culture and rape/domestic violence is? — Judaka

The latter exists preponderantly in the former. It's really not that complicated.

OK. Perhaps some of this will come out later in the exegesis. And apologies if I don't want to spend too long on your previous post. It was too large for me and would, I feel, take away from the reading to do in this thread.

Explain this comment. — Judaka

Get stuffed. I'm not giving you a crash course on Australian politics because you think I'm implying something that I did not. Maybe you can read up about the time that parliament here literally put forward a racist meme to be voted on. Or the time Morrison argued that the party should play up anti-Muslim sentiment for votes. Or read up on the multiple instances of race and immigrant baiting documented everywhere by Morrison and his shithouse of a cabinet (read up on 'Sudanese gangs' in Melbourne). Or how Morrison resisted for weeks before deciding to put preference votes (do you even know what those are?) of a literal racist party behind those of Labour. No, if you think that I'm calling him out because he merely 'dislikes and expresses concerns about Islam', then your ignorance is yours to deal with, not mine. Educate yourself before you spout this trash.

So your position is that rape and domestic violence are cultural issues for all the cultures in which these things take place? Rather than just admitting that even if a culture condemns those things, they happen anyway because the cause isn't cultural? Which would be logical considering it's obvious to anyone with any sense that most of the said cultures explicitly condemn those things? — Judaka

My position is that Australia is riven with all kind of systemic and cultural issues such as rape, domestic violence, murderous treatment of minorities and immigrants and all the rest of it. Your word salad of a translation of this is senseless and doesn't even get the subject of the sentence right (hint: it's 'Australia', not 'culture'), let alone anything else. Get the basic grammar right and maybe there'll be a bare minimum of a discussion to be had.

People who dislike and express concerns about Islam (for whatever reason) aren't culpable for mass murder in any sense. — Judaka

Perhaps you can point out where I said they are. Or where I spoke of a 'single culture'. Perhaps my pathology is a function of your illiteracy.

He wants us to what? Take a good look in the mirror at how we're part of the problem? — Judaka

Is this abhorrent to you?

Oh, and also, our PM, Scott Morrison, is a shitbag enabler who is most certainly culpable - though not alone - for fostering the kind of environment in which the shooter became who he is. And of course Australia is riven with all kind of systemic and cultural issues - rape, domestic violence, murderous treatment of minorities, immigrants, and the poor, and all the rest of it. Why is it so horrifying for you that this might be the case?

*yawn*. Banno's point - that murderers like the Christchurch shooter were precipitated out of the same culture which we tend to call 'ours' - is fairly reasonable (in fact the shooter's 'manifesto' was, among other things, a literal repository of well-known, very public, cultural memes) - and frankly it's your reaction which seems rather overblown and out of proportion. And, dare I say, pointing out 'the West's' complicity with the atrocities committed in the name of Islam is hardly a revolutionary position, and is something well known by anyone with an understanding of the geopolitics of the Middle-East and Muslim majority countries. I would suggest Karen Armstrong's The Battle For God, as a relatively gentle introduction to these issues, or Fawaz Gerges The Far Enemy for something more in depth.

§108

§108 can be partly read as a rejoinder to §93/95/96 where Witty was making fun of those who - like his previous self - insisted on the 'uniqueness' of the proposition. Here, Witty makes the complimentary claim that "propositions" and "language" are, instead, "a family of structures" - there is no 'formal unity' that underlies them.

It then goes asks to ask after the consequences of this shift for logic, and concludes that once again, it's simply a 'preconception' that must be removed, a preconception that does not make logic lose any of it's rigor. I'm reminded of dumbo, who can fly without his feather. Also, randomly, the last remark about 'real need' reminds me of Marx. Maybe @fdrake might be able to make a more substantive conceptual connection.

§105-§107

These sections seem to elaborate on the metaphorics of 'depth' first mentioned in §89. The rough idea seems to be that we want to look 'beneath' language (in all its messiness) to find the ideal. "What we ordinarily call 'sentences', 'words', and 'signs'" (§105), when measured against this (fantasy) of ideality, seem to come up short, as though they were not good enough. The "real sign" (Platonic?) must be found amid (beneath?) the jungle of appearances.

So there's a divergence, a splitting of paths, between the ideal and the actual, as it were: "the greater becomes the conflict between it [actual language] and our requirement" (§107). Witty emphasizes, importantly, that the ideal is, in fact, a 'requirement': it is not something found or 'discovered', but rather posited, or projected from without.

And so §107 ends with the famous exhortation to go "back to rough ground!", to give up the requirement that language meet our (unreasonable?) expectations of ideality. Pay attention to the actual, not the ideal: 'from close up' (§51). We must stop measuring the actual by the standard of the ideal. The glasses must come off (§103).

So you're saying that "rule" is an empty concept and that "the rule is dead", but also that "obviously there are rules in language - just ask your grade school teacher"? — Luke

Why do you think these are somehow incompatible? Maybe that might throw light on where, if anywhere, we disagree.

Good discussion, all very helpful! I was looking at Baker and Hacker for a bit of insight, and it turns out that §104 was originally located elsewhere in the text, before being placed where it ended up. Which maybe helps explain why it feels so out of place to me. Also, much of what's been said had me turning back to §50, which also deals with the issue of representation, even employing the same vocabulary of 'mode of representation' (from the discussion of the meter rule and samples):

§50: "This sample is an instrument of the language, by means of which we make colour statements. In this game, it is not something that is represented, but is a means of representation ... : if this thing did not exist, we could not use it in our language-game. a What looks as if it had to exist is part of the language. It is a paradigm in our game; something with which comparisons are made. And this may be an important observation; but it is none the less an observation about our language-game - our mode of representation".

In this light, I read §104 something like this: insofar as a great deal of our grammar involves 'fixing' our samples around which our language-games are built ("this is a meter. Now we can talk measurement") it is a mistake to project this fixing of grammar into nature itself, as it were. That we measure like so and not otherwise is a function of our grammar (itself a function of our forms of life), and is an index of human involvement.

This index, the fact that it is we who fix the terms of our grammar, marks our use of language as irreducibly 'specific', rather than (a) 'general' (state of affairs): our use of language does not reflect some underlying, eternal structure of the world (qua the Tractatus), but only our specific, human, purpose-bound use of language. So that's the 'general' bit, and how §104 fits in with the rest of the sections around it.

Last, the comparisons we make (this is one meter, that is two), seem, after the fact of fixing, to be a natural, fixed (read: general) state of affairs. Somehow, everything can be measured in meters and bits thereof! How wonderful! We are 'impressed' by this. And our being impressed leads us, once again, to generalise and see language as reflecting an underlying essence of the world, effacing the specifically human contingencies and necessities that govern our use of language.

There's a vignette, either in the PI or the Remarks on Mathematics - I can't remember - where Witty speaks of teaching someone how to count by adding n+1, which he does perfectly fine up to 200, at which point he starts adding 2; then adding 3 at 300, and so on, all the while insisting that he is adding n+1. Witty insists that at this point, this is 'just what that person does': here is where 'reasons give out': this way of counting is nor more or less 'correct' than ours, and is as 'specific' and 'not general' as our own way of counting. The mistake once again is to project our 'mode of representation' into the thing itself: to imagine that counting must be this way and not that, reflective of some underlying essence of counting.

Ok, I can move on now :D

But what if the coin was six dimensional, had four faces, magic powers, ate cornflakes for breakfast, but also not conflakes for breakfast, and was made of rubber and also cake, but was also a hippopotamus? Why can't we just admit we don't know what side it will land on?

God doesn't even pass the test of sense, let alone existence. You don't have to wonder weather a mistake of grammar actually exists or not.

That way they will have social stability without it being based on a terrible ideology that, among other things, promises boys in heaven. — Ilya B Shambat

Yes, in Christianity, you can have boys on Earth, at the alter. Reward minus the waiting time.

Two can play cultural pissing contest. The game itself, of course, is the worst thing about it all to begin with.

Has anyone linked to the Daily Nous 'response by physcists' post yet? (Did a quick scan, couldn't see anything) : http://dailynous.com/2019/03/21/philosophers-physics-experiment-suggests-theres-no-thing-objective-reality/

(EDIT: Ah, I see it was linked a couple of pages back. Still, it's a great read and worth mentioning again, I think!)

Some excerpts:

Karen Crowther: "In this ‘real life’ experiment, however, Wigner and his friend are not conscious observers, but pieces of machinery: they are measuring-and-recording devices. Proietti et al. (2019) argue that these devices can act as observers, defining an observer as any physical system that can extract information about another system (by means of an interaction) and can store that information in a physical memory. On this definition, computers and other devices can act as observers, just as humans can.

So, what is the philosophical interest in this particular experiment? The question is what this experiment demonstrates about QM that was not already known from the thought-experiment plus previous experimental results. Plausibly, what it shows is that a scenario analogous to the one imagined by Wigner is in fact physically possible, and in it the observers do record conflicting facts. Thus, the philosophical significance of the experiment is to make Wigner’s own interpretation of his thought-experiment look increasingly implausible: it is difficult to imagine that this experiment would not have been successful if the devices had conscious experiences.

But, on the other hand, the fact remains that these devices are not conscious, and so Wigner could stand resolute in his interpretation. If anything, he could point out that—in the same way that an observation of a non-black, non-raven provides a negligible sliver of confirmation for the claim that ‘all ravens are black’—the success of the experiment even provides inductive support in favour of his interpretation: the ‘observers’ in this experiment are able to record conflicting facts only because they do not experience these facts."

--

Sean Carroll: "There is a long tradition in science journalism—and one must admit that the scientists themselves are fully culpable in keeping the tradition alive—of reporting on experiments that (1) verify exactly the predictions of quantum mechanics as they have been understood for decades, and (2) are nevertheless used to claim that a wholesale reimagining of our view of reality is called for. This weird situation comes about because neither journalists nor professional physicists have been taught, nor have they thought deeply about, the foundations of quantum mechanics. We therefore get situations like the present one, where an intrinsically interesting and impressive example of experimental virtuosity is saddled with a woefully misleading sales pitch."

--

Tim Maudlin: "The way that this experiment is described—in terms of its significance—is complete nonsense. Physicists have become accustomed to spouting nonsense when quantum mechanics is the subject of discussion, which often takes the form of mind-blowing assertions about the loss of “classical reality” or even “classical logic”. The reason we know that all of this is nonsense right off the bat is that the experimental predictions of standard quantum mechanics can be accounted for—in several different ways—by theories that postulate an objective, unique physical reality governed by definite laws and using only classical logic and mathematics. So when the sorts of claims made in the title and abstract of the article are made, one knows immediately that they are unjustified hype."

So, Wittgenstein was in contradiction — Wallows

One can think oneself a flowerpot and not be a flowerpot. That's not a contradiction. That's being wrong. In any case, Witty simply had a narrow, thinly pitched idea of what he understood to be 'philosophy'; he may have exploded it, well even, but expunging shadows ain't all that.

Sure, but I've no pretension to declare the 'uselessness' or 'senselessness' of philosophy.

§104: One predicates of the thing what lies in the mode of representation. We take the possibility of comparison, which impresses us, as the perception of a highly general state of affairs.

§104

I'm slightly stumped on this and wonder if anyone might provide some extra commentary and thoughts: when Witty speaks about the possibility of comparison, what two things are being compared? (1) The thing and (2) The mode of representation? If so, in what does this comparison consist? And when he speaks of 'a highly general state of affairs', my assumption is that a distinction is being made between that and a 'specific' or circumscribed state of affairs. But how to characterise the difference between the two?

Apart from these the general gist I get is something like: don't confuse our use of grammar for the 'way things are'. Or: don't project our grammar, which bears upon our 'mode of representation', onto the things themselves. I'm not comfortable with these formulations which smell too much of metaphysics. And they seem out of keeping with the paragraphs both before and after it. Any thoughts?

Ah yes, Ilya's local salvation army are a bunch of good lads and lasses, so this must mean the West is all peaches. Reasoning for imbeciles.

Ah yes, the same 'morally superior' west that has continued to ardently support some of the most wicked regimes in the Muslim world, allowing them to stomp on their own people and keep them economically and culturally wretched. The same 'morally superior' West that has played enabler and ally of the very forces it likes to denounce as backward. The OP isn't brave. The OP is the very picture of what enables the status quo. A just-so story for dunces for whom history is too complicated. This much is true at least:

Further, the Muslim people owe a lot to America and the rest of the West. — Ilya B Shambat

Everything the West has touched in the Muslim world - and it has its filthy paws all over it - has turned to shit. For this, the Muslim people do indeed 'owe' the West. What 'moral superiority' the West can claim is swamped by its immoral complicity.

Like every other undertaker of philosophy, Wittgenstein was buried by it, and it will continue to bury those like him. In any case, Wittgenstein was a philosopher through and through - a philosopher who couldn't recognize himself in the mirror, and inspired a thousand other miserable soon-to-be-dead undertakers.

I mean, if one really wants a distillation of the Wittgenstienian approach to rules it really ought to be something like: 'What does the rule do? Look and see, from up close'. Not: 'Here is the a priori thing that rules definitely do in language'. The latter is 'philosophy' in Wittgenstein's pejorative key. To what use is the rule put? That is 'governed' by grammar.

Rules of use, (grammar) determine sense. Without these rules a word has no meaning, meaning is use. — unenlightened

This is a muddle. Witty never speaks about 'rules of use'. You won't even find the three words, in that order, in the text. There's good reason for that: specifically, rules do not govern use. Second, rules are not (Wittgensteinian) grammar. They are not synonyms and you won't find that equation in the text either. Meaning is use in a language-game; not, meaning is use governed by rules.

If Wittgenstein shows that "rules can and do play different roles in language", then clearly there are "rules...in language". These rules must govern the language, given that is the purpose of rules. — Luke

That there are rules in language is not under debate. The question is about their role in language. That rules can 'govern language' is also not under debate. The question is whether such 'governance' - another word that appears nowhere in the PI with respect to rules - exhaustively characterizes language, on Witty's view.

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I mean seriously, if the PI amounted to 'language is a rule governed activity', one wouldn't need to read a jot of it. One would just need to listen to your grade school teacher. As if Witty were just some philosophical enforcer for grammar school disciplinarians. Hopefully we get to the sustained rule following discussions further on in the text, with an eye to these questions. It might clear things up.

I very much dislike readings of Wittgenstein which equate him with saying that language is a 'rule governed activity'. There is a sense in which this is the case, but it's a sense that must be so heavily qualified and so massively underwritten by conditionals that I think it does far more to obscure and mislead than clarify the issues. One of the things Witty does in the PI is to expose the differential nature of rules, the fact that rules can and do play different roles in language (e.g. §54), so to say something like "For using words in speech is a rule-governed activity" is not so much wrong as simply empty - this says nothing in particular. Furthermore, Witty's constant refrain about rules governing rules ad infinitum (e.g. §84, §86) - and the ridiculousness of such an idea - also shows, to me anyway, what little stock he put in the idea of rules 'governing' language.

And really - just go through the PI: every mention of 'rules' is saturated with a kind of scepticism and cynicism that the whole enterprise comes across warning against any kind of hypostatization of rules. Rules are everywhere spoken about with suspicion, if not outright derision (§81-§86 is full of just such skepticism, you can almost breathe it, reading those passages).

I'm reading Stanley Cavell right now, and his take on Witty and 'rules' seems much more apropos:

"In order for there to "be" such things as rules, we have to agree in our judgment that a rule has been obeyed (or not). (The rule itself is dead.) In order for there to be such things as (what we call) measurements, we have to agree in our judgment that a particular thing turns out to have such-and-such measurements. It is one thing to know that you measure length by successive layings down of a stick; it is some thing else to know that this object is just under fourteen sticks long. (The stick itself is dead. It doesn't tell you where to begin laying it down; what counts as succession; and when, and what to do if, the last laying down goes just over.)" (The Claim of Reason, p.36, my emphasis): the rule itself is dead - this seems to me far more in the Wittgenstinian spirit than 'language is governed by rules'.

§100-§103

More attempts to shore up how Witty's sense of perfection can quite easily abide by indeterminancy and vagueness. Strong theme of how the idea 'dazzles' us (§100), 'absorbs' us (§101), appear as 'something in the background' (§102), and seems 'unshakeable' (§103). I wonder how much of this is Witty again reacting against his former self. The glasses metaphor makes it all feel like a matter of trying to induce a gestalt shift, where either one's whole view (on the ideality of language) changes, or not at all.

Another theme that makes a reappearance here are rules (§100, §102), which also work perfectly fine when they are 'vague', and not 'strict and clear'.