It's still a matter of feeling like a success or failure. I suppose completely embarrassing yourself would be a failure, as opposed to successfully surviving the truth or dare. — neonspectraltoast

I wouldn't consider "surviving" the game or preventing embarassment to be the point of the game of truth or dare. Why can't it just be for fun? It is seeming to require more and more contortion in order for you to maintain that success/failure is a necessary feature of all games.

We weren't talking about language games, but games in general, and whether all games must contain some common essential feature. Wittgenstein rejects this idea, claiming that games share in a family of similar features, but without there being one essential feature that every game must contain.

@nonspectraltoast claimed earlier that "An essential feature of games is that you win or lose."

Nevertheless, what about a game such as truth or dare. Is that a game? If so, what counts as successful and unsuccessful performance?

Catching the ball means winning the game?

If you accept Catch as a counterexample, then what is the essential feature that all games share?

"In ball-games, there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared."

Where is the uncertainty in the content of a text? — unenlightened

I was under the impression that unpredictability was a key feature of information entropy. The Wikipedia article on the subject states:

Entropy is a measure of the unpredictability of the state, or equivalently, of its average information content. To get an intuitive understanding of these terms, consider the example of a political poll. Usually, such polls happen because the outcome of the poll is not already known. In other words, the outcome of the poll is relatively unpredictable, and actually performing the poll and learning the results gives some new information; these are just different ways of saying that the a priori entropy of the poll results is large. Now, consider the case that the same poll is performed a second time shortly after the first poll. Since the result of the first poll is already known, the outcome of the second poll can be predicted well and the results should not contain much new information; in this case the a priori entropy of the second poll result is small relative to that of the first. — Wikipedia article

Do you understand what an essential feature is? You made a big fuss about sufficient and necessary features in the OP.

An essential feature of all games is to have both one player and two players?

Indeed it does and I did: — TheMadFool

You've listed different "essential" features for each game. Which one is essential to each that makes them all games?

But games do have essential, defining, features; we're simply failing to notice them and that not least because we're just too lazy to put in the required amount of effort. — TheMadFool

"We"? I've asked you to produce this/these essential feature(s) and you haven't. Your entire argument hinges on this.

That you recognized that misusing words is a possibility says enough. — TheMadFool

I'm trying to get you to give up on the idea that games must have an essential feature. Wittgenstein's family resemblance rejects and replaces this idea. I don't really think I'm misusing the word.

To tell you the truth, I don't know what the essential features of games are — TheMadFool

Then why should I accept that games must have an essential feature? How do you know that you're not misusing the word?

Do you mind elaborating a bit more. — TheMadFool

Do you mind articulating the essential feature of all games? Maybe I'm misusing the word.

As you can see, chickens, bats, and tuataras constitute the family resemblance of the word "owl" — TheMadFool

This is not analogous with the example of games. This analogy implies that non-games all constitute a family resemblance of the word "game". Instead, games are "connected by a series of overlapping similarities where no one feature is common to all". They share enough similar features that we call them all games, but there is no essential feature (and no distinct boundary) of what is (or is not) a game.

You don't need to think too hard to realize that the definition of "good" comprises all three features (X, Y, and Z). This clearly shows that, sometimes, the meaning of words is to be found not in some shared common feature that unites the various usages of a word but in combining all features present in the different ways the word is used. — TheMadFool

None of these features is essential to the definition of "good" and there are possibly other features as well.

How does one philisophize about a word whose meaning we haven't yet figured out? — TheMadFool

Which words have meanings that "we haven't figured out yet"? You could always refer to a dictionary to find the common meanings/uses of a word.

I went into, what seemed to me as, quite some detail how those features that determine family resemblance amounts to a comprehensive list of sufficient and necessary features that decides when a word is applicable (or not). — TheMadFool

If your list of features was sufficient and necessary then each game (of J, K and L) would have all three features (of A + B + C). But none of them has all three features, as per your example:

This implies A + B + C, being all sufficient and necessary features for something to be a game, is the definition of "game". How then is J or K or L a game? After all each one of them seems to lack a feature — TheMadFool

To answer your question here: they can all be games precisely because of family resemblance, which rejects that games must be defined in terms of sufficient and necessary features.

Family resemblance...argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all of the things. — Wikipedia article

It therefore rejects the idea that games must have necessary and sufficient features.

Information increases as order decreases. — unenlightened

From my brief reading on the subject, I would find this easier to understand if it were rewritten as "novel information increases as unpredictability increases". However, your expression may be more concise.

I've downloaded some of Barrett's papers and will try to understand them, but for now I am confused. The OP seemed to indicate that we were in conscious control of our emotions, e.g. saying that emotions are the "outcome of an evaluative process", which e.g. could be used to deter a bully. This motivated my question of whether there were any involuntary emotions, or emotions out of our control. However, recent posts by @Isaac and @Possibility seem to indicate that Barrett's theory of emotions is an entirely unconscious or involuntary view of what's happening 'under the hood'. If this is right, then how does our conscious feeling of emotions tie into this?

Thanks for the reply. To try and clarify the intent of my question, you appeared to be suggesting in the OP that the "classical view of emotion" had been (or could be) superseded by Barrett's view of emotions as a skill or a tool, e.g., where emotions can be used as an intentional response to a bully. I was wondering whether Barrett's view actually supersedes and replaces the classical view, or whether some aspects of the classical view could be retained. One aspect of the classical view I had in mind, in particular, was overwhelming emotions, and/or becoming emotional involuntarily or unexpectedly (to oneself). It seemed to me that @Hanover was possibly hinting at the same thing with his example of the emotions of a newborn crying baby.

Some relevant quotes from Barrett that I gleaned from the video:

Emotions...are not universally expressed and recognised. They are not hardwired brain reactions that are uncontrollable.

Barrett states the above near the start of the video. At first, I thought she was going to continue to state that emotions are completely within our control, to be used as tools, as the OP suggests. But towards the end of the video, she says:

I am not suggesting to you that you can just perform a couple of Jedi mind tricks and then talk yourself out of being depressed or anxious or any kind of serious condition. But I am telling you that you have more control over your emotions than you might imagine, and that you have the capacity to turn down the dial on emotional suffering and its consequences for your life by learning how to construct your experiences differently.

This indicates a weaker claim that we can control our emotions to some extent, but not completely. I take it from this that overwhelming emotions, and at least part of classical view, remains intact.

Can there be involuntary emotions, according to this theory?

Good, then I don't see the problem. I'm not going to play this game where I point out to you that we have knowledge (in a non-absolute sense) of what "pain" means and what causes it, and then you continue to question whether our knowledge of its causes is absolute and to pretend that you're not sure whether you feel pain or to know what it is.

Do you believe that anything is known in an absolute sense? — Metaphysician Undercover

Do you believe that anything can be known in any sense?

So it's not the case that I changed the question I was asking. You just misinterpreted what I meant by "cause of pain", as did jgk20, and you offered me a solution which related to your interpretation, rather than what I really meant. And then when I explain what I meant, you accuse me of changing the question. I'm not changing the question, your the second person that I've had to explain this very same question to already. And now I'll explain it again to you.

We are discussing here "pain", as a type of feeling, and the reasons why some feelings can be classed as this type rather than some other type. You show me through your video, how some particular instances of "feeling" are caused. The video gives no real explanation as to why the feeling which comes out of these circumstances is felt as pain and not some other type of feeling, so it does not answer the question. The reason why the video fails here is that it gives no indication of what type of thing a feeling is.

Do you see this? If we're grounding the concept of "pain" in "a type of feeling", then we require some explanation of what a feeling is, in order to be able differentiate it from other feelings as a valid "feeling". — Metaphysician Undercover

@jkg20 was previously trying to work out the unknown aspect of pain you claimed there to be, other than our public expressions and private sensations of pain. I have been trying to work out whether it is the cause (of pain) or the effect (pain itself; what pain is; the meaning of "pain") to be this unknown aspect. More accurately, I have been trying to pin you down on what else there could be to explain about pain besides these two.

Now you're saying that this unknown aspect of pain of yours - which turns out to be not even specifically about pain - is actually an "explanation of what a feeling is"? Well, I could recommend that you look up the word "feeling" in the dictionary, or else look into the physiological causes of feelings. However, you'd probably just change the subject again.

Your video goes in a completely different direction, instead of defining "pain" with "type of feeling", it grounds pain in an identifiable type of physical occurrence, an injury. This would require that we go by a different definition of "pain", "the feeling caused by a physical injury". But that was not our accepted definition of "pain". Furthermore, this definition would exclude a huge portion of the feelings which we call "pain", things such as emotional suffering, hunger, etc.. That would be an unwarranted narrowing of the definition of pain, which would mislead us in our enquiry as to what pain actually is. — Metaphysician Undercover

It would make no difference if the video were to include all types of pain. You weren't interested in the narrow explanation because you weren't even talking about pain specifically.

That's the point. — Metaphysician Undercover

What's the point? You said: "I have a feeling which I judge as unpleasant and I call it pain". I asked why you judge it as unpleasant rather than pleasant.

The issue is what causes this type of feeling to be felt as pain rather than as pleasure or something completely different. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't understand. You appear to assume that a feeling of pain could instead have been a feeling of pleasure or some other feeling. Why assume this? If you're asking for something besides the cause of pain here, then what is it?

Furthermore, we need to account for why the different feelings are substantially different, some being painful and some pleasurable for example. — Metaphysician Undercover

Because they're different feelings?

It's as though you were to ask why some colours are substantially different, some being green and some red for example, but then when vision and colour perception is explained to you, you claim that you were asking a different question.

If this is a true difference, then there must be something about the feeling itself which makes it painful or pleasurable. — Metaphysician Undercover

You could look up a different video on the physiology of pleasure. I doubt it works the same way as the physiology of pain. Or you could tell us why you have a feeling that you judge as unpleasant and call it pain..

I have a feeling which I judge as unpleasant and I call it pain. — Metaphysician Undercover

Why do you judge it as "unpleasant" rather than "pleasant"?

Your referred video doesn't answer the question asked though, why a specific type of feeling is felt as pain rather than as pleasure, or something else. — Metaphysician Undercover

The topic of the video is pain, including its known causes. Weren't you asking what causes pain? Wasn't that what you claimed not to know? Well, now you know, or have some knowledge. At any rate, the causes of pain are not "unknown" as you indicated earlier.

Furthermore, I don't understand your question about "why a feeling is felt as pain rather than pleasure". An unpleasant feeling simply is pain, as per your own definition.

The fact that I can talk about this distinction between pleasant and unpleasant, making my own subjective distinction between these two, and I can even assume that such an objective distinction might at some future time be produced, doesn't mean that I believe that there is currently an objectively defined difference between them, which I might refer to in making that judgement, and that would be required in order for me to know. — Metaphysician Undercover

Let's be clear here: do you lack knowledge of the cause or the effect? You don't know what pain is or you don't know what causes it?

Regarding the effect, you aren't making a subjective distinction between 'pleasant' and 'unpleasant'. You didn't invent the meanings of these words. If you are unsure what they mean, you can look up their meanings in a dictionary.

No one forces you to accept conventional definitions. But if you refuse conventional definitions in a philosophical discussion you need to justify your refusal or else it appears like you are simply refusing because conventional wisdom doesn't support your particular philosophy. Any philosophy not supported by conventional wisdom needs to be justified or else people just dismiss it as crackpottery.

Otherwise, if you want to know the causes of pain, then this might help to begin with:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7wfDenj6CQ

we do not have adequate knowledge of what pain is, in order to be able to identify a cause of it — Metaphysician Undercover

You said earlier that it was an "unpleasant feeling". Now you don't know what it is?

As for the cause of pain, science and medicine have some understanding of how pain works.

Haha, that's funny. Philosophy has a long history of rooting out and exposing deception. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all addressed sophistry as a significant problem inherent within the educational institutions of the day. Then came skepticism. Now we have all sorts of modern attacks on deception, starting with Descartes. I believe that a philosophy with no principles for the recognition of deception, to distinguish real knowledge from fake knowledge, is useless, and not actually philosophy. But many, perhaps you, believe that philosophy is useless. — Metaphysician Undercover

I have no idea why you would expect Wittgenstein's philosophy to help you identify when people are pretending to be in pain. This is not something Wittgenstein was attempting to do. None of the philosophers you mention above did so, either. You might as well complain that Kant didn't write a cookbook.

The Tractatus, in my eyes, is just saying that language mirrors facts in the world, that it is/was designed to do this, and nothing more. — Pussycat

Isn't the point to say/show what lies outside, or at the limit, of this picture of atomic facts/language/the world, such as the human subject, ethics, and that which can only be shown but not said?

We also have to use our bodies. Does that make the world dependent on our hands, eyes, brains? — Marchesk

No, it makes the debate dependent on them.

That doesn't mean the thing being debated is dependent on language. — Marchesk

Even though we have to use it?

This is where Wittgenstein fails as you describe. "The private sensation is real, but nothing can be said about it; nothing further about it can be described or discussed in our public language." By claiming nothing can be said about this internal, private thing, he leaves us completely vulnerable, without any principles to address deception. — Metaphysician Undercover

You expect that Wittgenstein's philosophy should enable us to prevent deception?

But how about descriptions of afterimages? It doesn't seem to be a metaphorical or non literal use of colour and shape vocabularly when we describe them. — jkg20

I may have misspoken when I stated earlier: "What is hidden, if anything, is what pain feels like for me, compared to what it feels like for you. Is it the same? We can't talk about it, so who knows?"

We can talk about it, but only in our public language (the same applies to our talk of afterimages or dream contents). I should have said that we can't talk about it using some private language that describes how it feels exclusively for me or exclusively for you. The point is that the meaning of a sensation word such as 'pain' is not derived from any individual's experience of that sensation. Rather than getting caught up in what we can and can't talk about (using public language) regarding sensations, I should instead follow Wittgenstein to say that the private aspect of an experience (assuming that there is one), "drops out of consideration as irrelevant" with regard to the meaning of a word like 'pain'.

I remember having sciatic pain described to me, before I ever had sciatica, as like having streaks of burning electricity pulsing down the leg. Then, one day, I felt something those words described well and it occurred to me that I was sufferring from sciatica, and my self diagnosis turned out to be spot on. So, whilst I certainly cannot feel another person's pain for them, just as I cannot doff their cap for them, I can feel same pain another person feels, I can take the cap from their head and doff with it myself, and we can, it seems, usefully describe to each other exactly what it is we are feeling. — jkg20

I had considered this sort of thing, but I wonder if it isn't more of a comparison - a simile or metaphor - rather than a direct description. It reminds me of the cliche "tastes like chicken" which isn't a very helpful description of taste, although it may give some idea. Come to think of it, it's funny how we generally describe the taste of most foods as the food itself, or in terms of one of the five basic taste descriptions (including salt-y), rather than in more specific terms. Anyway, I guess the question could become one of degree regarding what makes a (useful?) description.

Nonetheless, I think it makes sense to say that one can't compare their subjective experience to someone else's and that these private sensations are what some philosophers have assumed to give words their meanings. As noted in the SEP article on Private Language:

For example, a still very common idea, often attributed to John Locke and openly embraced by Jerry Fodor in the nineteen seventies, is that interpersonal spoken communication works by speakers’ translation of their internal mental vocabularies into sounds followed by hearers’ re-translation into their own internal vocabularies. Again, Descartes considered himself able to talk to himself about his experiences while claiming to be justified in saying that he does not know (or not until he has produced a reassuring philosophical argument) anything at all about an external world conceived as something independent of them. And he and others have thought: while I may make mistakes about the external world, I can infallibly avoid error if I confine my judgments to my immediate sensations. (Compare The Principles of Philosophy, I, 9.) Again, many philosophers, including John Stuart Mill, have supposed there to be a problem of other minds, according to which I may reasonably doubt the legitimacy of applying, say, sensation-words to beings other than myself.

In each of these examples, the implication is that the internal vehicle of my musings could in principle be private (as Kenny [1966, p. 369] showed, this vehicle does not have to be a language for the argument to apply to it): for these problems and theories even to make sense, sharability must be irrelevant to meaning and it must be at least conceivable that my knowledge, even my understanding, is necessarily confined to my own case.

But surely "debates such as realism/idealism" do "depend on our language usage". If we are going to debate e.g. "the nature of the world", then we have to do it using language, no?

There lies the rub. To be honest, I am not certain that this interpretation of W is correct, nor that the ideas I am trying to force on him do so either. I am trying to see if there is room for both the general Wittgensteinian position that "nothing is hidden, everything is on the surface" on the one had, and the idea that pain behaviour and mock pain behaviour are distinct things. If they are distinct, then it is fairly natural to think that the difference lies in what the actors are feeling, but if everything is on the surface, then so is what they are feeling. In the end, it may not be a tenable position, but I have yet to see an out and out contradiction in it. — jkg20

This certainly made me re-think my position.

One way of looking at it is to re-visit what Wittgenstein says at §304. He admits that there is a difference between real and mock pain behaviour. ("What greater difference could there be?") Regarding the sensation itself, he affirms that it is not a Nothing; "only that a Nothing would render the same service as a Something about which nothing could be said". The private sensation is real, but nothing can be said about it; nothing further about it can be described or discussed in our public language. I think the same issue arises in more recent philosophical discussions such as 'Mary's Room' and the like.

Regarding your example, you are correct that "the difference lies in what the actors are feeling", since the distinction is between pain behaviour with pain and pain behaviour without pain. The difference is, obviously, the pain (having it or not having it). What is hidden, if anything, is what pain feels like for me, compared to what it feels like for you. Is it the same? We can't talk about it, so who knows? It won't affect the meaning or use of the word 'pain' anyway. Regardless of what it feels like internally for each of us, reactions to pain, or pain behaviours, tend to appear similar across genuine cases, which may help to explain why someone can pretend to be in pain. This public exhibition also seems the more likely determinant of the meaning/use of the word 'pain'.

Where the beetle can be shown, is a case he says nothing about, because it is not, as you point out, his target at all. — jkg20

Could you explain how the beetle can be shown? I understand it to represent the subjective aspect of a sensation, or in philosophical jargon: qualia. This is what sections 296 and 298 that I quoted earlier appear to indicate; e.g. the 'something' that "accompanies my cry of pain" (which is "important" and "frightful").

And therefore, we do not construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and name'? Seems convoluted. I don't follow how this reconciles with your reading that Wittgenstein challenges a private "inner".