It's not like Wittgenstein had nothing to say about meaning, and he's widely read as endorsing a kind of functionalism: the meaning of a word, perhaps as well the meaning of a sentence, simply is the use one makes of it, or can make of it, as a move in a language-game.

Whether that paragraph represents Wittgenstein well, I'll pass on for now.

The question I am trying to raise is whether that view, LW's or not, is defensible.

If no one in this thread holds that view, I won't get anywhere unless someone plays devil's advocate, but I would be surprised, as most of the Wittgensteinian folks around here are only too happy to talk about 'moves in a language-game' and so forth. Maybe @Luke will take me up on it.

The method Witt uses in imagining a context for an expression is to show that the sentence is meaningful, — Antony Nickles

Was it meaningless when originally said here a few pages back?

Suppose I claim to know I have five dollars, but refuse to open my wallet in justification. It would be quite reasonable for you to doubt my claim. — Banno

Looking in your wallet is how we would verify that you have $5; how would we verify that you knew that, that you weren't just guessing?

"I know I have and itch" doesn't achieve the status of being eligible for a truth value, to use your somewhat constipated term, becasue it is not grammatically a statement. It's not like "Paris is the capital of France"; Nor "Paris is the capital of Germany"; but more like "Paris is the capital of lemongrass". — Banno

If it's like the last one, then is it meaningless?

By the way, are you allowing that it can be true or false that I know Paris is the capital of France? How about, "I know I left my keys right here"? Or "I know I was thinking about something important a minute ago, but now I can't remember what it was"?

Again, AN isn't there to point blame at people, just recognize what is going on and to prevent the harms onto a future person. — schopenhauer1

Except it is a specific claim that you should not have children, isn't it? That to do so would be wrong, would be blameworthy. Benatar does not just say, "If and only if you have children, they will be harmed," which is surely true, but also, "Therefore you should not have children."

I think there's some room for debate there, but let's say you're right about all of that. What I'm more interested in at the moment is this sort of claim:

You can't correctly be said to know you have an itch. — Banno

Does that mean it's incorrect to say I know I have a headache? "Incorrect" how? In the sense that it's false? Or does "I know I have a headache", despite appearances, have no truth-value?

There are all sorts of sentences that are still meaningful despite lacking a truth-value, but this isn't a question or a command or a recommendation, or any of those cases; it's a simple indicative sentence. For sentences like that, being meaningful and being truth-apt go hand-in-hand. So do we conclude that "I know I have a headache" is meaningless, or that it is some sort of exception?

The question is exactly this: is the use of a sentence in a language-game its meaning? (Whether this is what Wittgenstein claims, I'd leave aside for the moment.) If you show, to your satisfaction, that a given sentence is not a 'valid move in a language-game' --- and let's say "You don't demonstrate to your self that you have a pain - you just have a pain" does that --- then did you thereby show that the sentence is meaningless? Or that it lacks a truth-value? Or both?

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

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

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

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

Or 'I remembered my own name again,' when filling out a form.

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

I'll just say again that, it seems to me unlikely that Wittgenstein had the same understanding of "language-game" as someone inclined to ask, 'Is such-and-such a language game?' or 'Is such-and-such really a language-game?' or 'Is such-and-such a proper or correct language-game?' since he himself never seems to ask such questions. Rather than think such obvious questions didn't occur to him, I'm inclined now to think maybe "language-game" is not an ontological category at all, but a sort of analysis.

Maybe. But then it's still odd that he didn't foresee what in some ways is a very natural and apparently widespread misreading, and preemptively warn against it, so I don't know that my idea isn't in the same boat.

common sense as a flattening out of individual experience in which everyone is on the same page because the common understanding is designed to be vague , ambiguous and general enough to foster this sense of shared experience. — Joshs

Oof. I hope we can aim a little higher than that.

Maybe, for comparison, something more like this:

Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. — Thoreau

You can speak plainly and simply without thereby simplifying what you have to say or being insincere, without changing what you have to say into 'what everyone says'. To do so is to honor your own experience, your own thought, and to honor your audience. I hope.

Speaking in such a way that an audience can grasp your intended meaning sounds to me like an exercise that is useful in only the most superficial sort of circumstance — Joshs

It's a start. There's little point in speaking Russian to me, for instance. And you need to be mindful of what your audience is likely to know and not know. The basics.

This isn’t a matter of not being able to interpret single utterances, but of not fathoming the deeper motivational justification for the actions of others. Single utterances are just the tip of an enormous iceberg — Joshs

Absolutely. I'm not talking just about understanding the meaning of what you say (as above--- I, for instance, don't grok Russian) but also what you mean by saying it. Beyond that there are of course bigger questions, like are you seeking truth or trolling? And bigger. If 'bigger' is the right way to put that.

Put differently, truly common sense is often the product of an enormous effortful constructive achievement. — Joshs

I wouldn't disagree, but it's not what people usually mean by 'common sense'. The usual sense is what allows people to understand statements like @Daemon's: "If the baby doesn't thrive on raw milk, try boiling it."

And I stand by my 'court of appeal' thing, I think: when someone says, "That doesn't follow" or something similar, I think something like 'common sense', as it's usually understood, is the ultimate backstop. If you can't make the steps of your point in plain language relying only on the usual canons of informal rationality, there's nothing else to appeal to. (I'm thinking of this a little in terms of the debates about the 'expressive power' of programming languages, if that helps.)

I think I would include in 'common sense' the precept that an utterance ought to be understood as it was intended and not some other way. On the other hand, you have to speak in such a way that your audience can grasp your intended meaning. (Plus all the other layers Grice describes.)

Did you have something different in mind? Have I failed to grasp the intended meaning of your post?

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

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

We cling to the aspiration for the ideal — Antony Nickles

I'm not convinced by this "clinging" image, or by pointing the finger at our "desire" for certainty, as if the trouble is some psychological quirk. I think language is inherently idealizing, and when we talk about it, we're idealizing the idealizing already there, but--- language is also strangely open-ended, and in coming up with new uses (@StreetlightX, @Joshs) we are not only idealizing anew but undermining older idealizations.

What Wittgenstein is able to show, when he describes the language-game in which an Important Word has its 'original home' (was that the phrase?), is not a use devoid of idealization, but how idealization works, and how it can be used to do work. For a novel use to be useful, we need to understand how older usages manage to be successful, and that's what language-games are supposed to make apparent.

I think so, yes. If there's uncertainty or confusion, explanations will have to be made, and those will have to come to ground somewhere. There is, it seems to me, no higher 'court of appeal' available than common sense.

How about "trolling"? — Michael Zwingli

Wikipedia is your friend:

In internet slang, a troll is a person who posts inflammatory, insincere, digressive,[1] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog), with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses,[2] or manipulating others' perception. — Wiki

Yes.

Brutish moderation is worse than trolling. — Varde

Either can destroy a community we intend to preserve.

But it can still get you banned.

It doesn't seem to be easily resolvable. — Sam26

But is it a problem with Wittgenstein or with this way of reading him?

In the case of not having kids, we know that we benefitted no one. We have prevented harm from no one. — khaled

Wearing my 'moral sentiments' hat, I would add that doing good for another or preventing harm to them gives rise to a feeling that you have done good. If a stack of boxes is about to fall over on someone and you help them shore those boxes up, they feel relief and gratitude toward you for your help; I think Adam Smith would say you imaginatively share in their feelings and that's why you feel that your action was positive and moral.

I think, in general, this sort of thing reinforces the reciprocity of our moral duties and expectations. We help them in part because they would have helped us, or because they should even if they're not the sort of person who would. You also set an example by your behavior, and demonstrate what virtuous behavior is.

In the case of children, there are long-standing customs of filial piety; it's one of the central virtues and duties of Confucianism, and the ancient Hebrews even claimed it as a commandment from God. It is the complement of the duty of parents to care for their children, and the virtue of being a good parent.

Antinatalism cannot, by definition, include this sort of reciprocity. Your duty is to no one; the good you do is for no one. They cannot learn from your example to become more virtuous.

what is "flaming" — Michael Zwingli

Flaming is insulting someone in an online discussion, and is much older than social media. As practiced here, I consider it an attempt at bullying rather than arguing and I have a very low tolerance for it. Call your opponent's position 'stupid' all you want; call them 'stupid' and your post may very well be deleted.

A 'sockpuppet' is an account you pretend is not yours. In this case, as none of us are public figures, that would mean a secondary account. If I created an account to constantly chime in agreeing with Srap, that would be a sockpuppet, or if I were banned and returned under a new name every five minutes or so.

If I'm robbed at gunpoint and pistol-whipped, I feel wronged by the guy that did it but I don't feel wronged by my parents. My parents will sympathize and wish that hadn't happened, they'll feel all sorts of things about the guy who did it, and they may even feel some anger at the police or policymakers for 'allowing this sort of thing to happen', and so might I, but they won't feel guilty for having brought me into the world and no one, including me, will expect them to. So it is for any harm done to me by another.

If I skid off the road during a rainstorm and end up in the hospital, I won't feel wronged by anyone, unless some of my injuries turn out to be related to deceptive safety claims by the maker of the car, that sort of thing, and certainly my parents won't feel guilty because I had a car accident and no one, including me, will expect them to. So it is for all accidents and 'acts of God'.

Is it your position that parents have wronged their children? That's a simple yes or no question.

If the answer is 'yes', how do you square that with our moral intuitions?

So far as I know, everyone banned in the last few days was Marco.

I said that TMF's comment already had a context: that in which the comment was made. There was no need to try and find another context for it, other than you wanting to avoid dealing with TMF's point, that feeling is knowing. — Olivier5

Why is context the point of debate here?

What does the context in which @TheMadFool made the statement 'add' in this case? You agree with TMF that when someone has a headache, they know it; would you disagree if he had said it in another context? I think what you're actually saying is that the truth of his claim is not dependent on the context in which it is uttered. It's just true.

If we're only interested in truth-value, then we're done with that claim. But if we hope to use that sentence to make a point, in a philosophical discussion, we do need a little more. It proposes a relation between pain and knowledge; we would like to know more about how that relation works.

Is the statement "when I have a headache, I know it" informative? If so, is it because our understanding of pain changes or is it our understanding of knowledge? (Scientific statements can work like this, I think.) If it's not informative, then what's it doing? How can an uninformative statement be useful when doing philosophy? (None of these questions are rhetorical, if that's not clear.)

Would you care to elaborate?

To ask in response: "in what context would you say that?" appeared to me a disingenuous attempt to change the conversation, to escape the actual context of the sentence, to avoid having to face the sentence itself, because it is obviously true. — Olivier5

I get that. To you it's like answering "Why didn't you do the dishes?" with "Why are you trying to make me feel bad?" You see it as a rhetorical move to avoid engaging with the literal meaning of the sentence and either agreeing or disagreeing that it is true.

That concern is not irrelevant to the discussion, but it kinda leads everywhere. We are right on top of issues surrounding the slogan "meaning is use", so I'm not going to try to -- that is, I'm not posting any of the lengthy responses I've written where I try to -- wrap it all up definitively.

It's a valid question, and it is presumably close to why @TheMadFool started this discussion.

I claim that we can and do have a well-founded expectation that a person whose life we start will wish for their life to continue and they will, insofar as they are capable and interested, consider their life 'worthwhile', 'worth continuing', 'worth the trouble', worth, in short, more than almost anything they can imagine. ('I am willing to die for ___' is the highest expression of value we know, reserved for our loved ones, our core commitments, and so on.) Parents as a rule commit to their children's lives not becoming 'not worth it' and are held accountable by others for doing so.

Do you claim that this expectation is not well-founded? That it is not well-founded enough? That it is irrelevant?

An event becomes more past, not by 'flowing' further down the river of time, but by the sensation of pastness becoming more intense in God. — Bartricks

(1) Why do the sensations of futurity and pastness become less and more intense in God? Why does their intensity change? Is it so because this just is the nature of time (as God created it)?

(2) Is this what you mean when you say that God is subject to time, that these sensations change in intensity? Or that they change in a specific way, futurity always lessening, pastness always increasing? Or is just that God has these sensations at all?

Why do we need the term ‘epistemology’ at all after Wittgenstein? — Joshs

Or before! John Cook Wilson said, back in the previous twenties, that to him the phrase "theory of knowledge" looked like a fallacy.

My point was that the sentence was expressed in a certain context: that of a philosophical discussion on TPF. There is no need to look for another context in which it could possibly be said. It arose here and this is the context where it may be meaningful. Look at the post it was replying to. That should be context enough. — Olivier5

But it's a little more complicated than that. Was it said as a philosophical conclusion, or as an example of the sort of thing someone might say, when not doing philosophy, that seems to make perfect sense? (Roughly, was it theory or data?) If it's a bit of philosophy, are any of the words there used in a special technical sense that it is not what people ordinarily have in mind when they use those words? And if that's the case, how to connect that usage to ordinary usage, so that our philosophical discussion is relevant?

I don't think any of that has anything to do with Wittgenstein, but with philosophical discussion being unavoidably embedded in ordinary discussion, in the life of a language that philosophy relies on but did not invent.

"Everyone else", a phrase that here means "about 100 billion human beings."

There's an old story about the committee deciding what to put on Voyager to represent mankind, and a mathematician said, "We could send some Bach, but that would be bragging."

If you start from the position that there is no cosmic meaning to be found, then the only sort of value we know of is value to sentient beings. In a universe with no sentient beings, Bach is just noise.

In AN terms, my argument here has been that the bias in favor of continuing life, which Benatar acknowledges and does not contest, is and should be relied upon in decisions about starting a life. I see that as forcing the question to remain at human scale; we attach value to our lives and we know almost everyone else, including those we bring into the world, does too. The fact that it is a bias, that it's "only" what humans think, and that most likely we think it because we're wired to, makes no difference if our concern is only the sorts of meaning and value that humans know and care about.

All of moral behavior is predicated on the value we all know we attach to life. If there were no people, there'd be no morality and no point to it anyway. If your moral theory requires that there be no people, it's either mistaken, paradoxical, or not actually a moral theory at all.

I'm taking a break from this. Thanks for the conversation.

By NOT preventing the future person's suffering, one is overlooking the dignity of the person being born. — schopenhauer1

You don't respect someone's dignity by deciding for them whether their life, and whatever they find of value in it, is worth the suffering they endure for it. People choose to suffer for goals they have set for themselves, train to become athletes, practice to become musicians, study to become scholars; it's for them to decide whether it's worth it.

We teach kids to read before they're capable of deciding for themselves whether reading is worth the trouble. Is that cruel? Is that inflicting needless suffering? You know why we teach kids to read; the ability to read enlarges your world. We want children to have access to those possibilities and opportunities that only reading can provide. It will be for them to decide, later, what to take and what to leave. Do people who can read regret having the ability? There may be one, now and then; I can imagine someone having a spiritual objection to symbolism of all sorts, to language as such. But overwhelmingly people who can read are glad they can, and people who can't read desperately want to. And overwhelmingly people who can read were taught to read because someone else decided for them, when they were young, but that decision has this specific form: you will think later that it was worth the trouble of learning. I don't teach a kid to read because I think it will be worth it; it's not a case of inflicting this suffering on them "for their own good", as I judge it, but because I believe they will think, later, when they're able, that it's worthwhile. It's still their feelings that matter. If I don't teach them to read, on the chance they'll wish I hadn't, I cut them off from countless opportunities for experience they might value deeply, I constrain the possibilities of their life cruelly.

There is a difference between being paternal and being paternalistic.

Why do humans need to constantly justify their actions? — schopenhauer1

We don't. This whole line of reasoning is patently false. No one justifies everything they do. No one thinks they need to justify everything they do. In fact, there's something a lot of people do unthinkingly that you want to convince them they should stop doing unthinkingly and try to justify. You have this so backwards, it's bizarre.

We don't just do things in a mode of "unthinking" but need reasons, justifications, evaluations, weighing things. This is the feature of being an animal that has evolved (with?) linguistic adaptations. We can't "just be" in the world like other animals. — schopenhauer1

Yeah, we can, and we do, all the time. We do some stuff other animals don't, but we're still animals the whole time and we still reproduce just like animals, without justifying this behavior. You want us to stop. If your description of human alienation were anything close to reality, you wouldn't have to convince people to think about whether having kids might be immoral.

I think philosophy has tried to become more rational which includes providing a theory of science. Imagine dismissing philosophy's attempts to become more rational. — hanaH

If philosophy provides a theory of science, and then tries to, I don't know, 'measure up' to that theory, then philosophy is trying to meet a standard it has set itself.

If philosophy attempts to become more rational, does that mean that it accepts, from outside itself, a standard of rationality that it tries to meet, or, as above, does it set the standard itself?

And what discipline is responsible for holding philosophy to this standard, for measuring its progress, for determining 'how rational' it is? Is that, again, philosophy itself?

Are you not describing how one uses 'rules'? — hanaH

Maybe, but not excluding normativity. It's a reminder, but a reminder from one member of our speech community to another. If description alone is not enough for you to know what such a reminder means, how you should respond, or what you should do next, then we have a problem

The rules of a game are not a description of the game.

This morning it occurs to me that the first great 'triumph' of the logical form approach was something called, oddly enough, the "theory of descriptions". And then here's LW opposing description to theory.

Among other things, the theory of descriptions embeds a universally quantified conditional --- i.e., an hypothesis --- in denotative phrases like "the present king of France":

$\exists x(Fx \wedge \forall y (Fy \to y = x))$

So could be just a little reminder to insiders, with a mischievous wink, that he's not doing that anymore. In certain quarters at the time, the word "description" alone carried a whole theory along with it.

Apposite quotes, thanks. §100 is one of the ones I was remembering.

Is there connective tissue between §23 and §100 to suggest that the Doctrine of No Theory is derived directly from the countlessness of kinds of sentences? (I'm working from memory here but will go back to the text too.) I keep thinking the prohibition would stand even if you had an enormous Austinian catalog of sentence types and language-games.

Why say, "There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations"? The implication is that theory is hypothetical and description is not. I suppose that's kind of what I've been trying to suggest by saying that sense in a language-game is obvious, plain to see. But why say, "there must not be anything hypothetical" rather than "there need not be anything hypothetical"?

I can't connect this "hypothetical" talk to anything else in LW off the top of my head. I can make some guesses, but LW says I shouldn't. Do you know what's going on here?

I understand the impulse. For a while I read Wittgenstein as a man desperately trying to invent game theory. Same really for Paul Grice. But the game-theory version of all this you find in David Lewis's Convention kinda ends up in the wilderness without quite reaching the revelation it was looking for.

I don't see much to brag about with any of the previous attempts to make philosophy into a science, and I don't really need a new vocabulary, so I've been retreating from the whole approach.

I'll tell you one thing I've kept from reading Lewis, though I don't remember whether he says it in so many words: once we upgraded from signaling to language, we didn't stop signaling. We use words now because, well, there they are. Sometimes when you utter a perfectly coherent bit of English, you're not really speaking at all, but only signaling. We know that, but we forget. ("How are you?" might be an English question or it might be the vocal equivalent of a smile and a nod.)

Perhaps Wittgenstein should have stressed not only the other signs (the system of signs) but the world with which that system is entangled. It's not so trivial to separate signs from non-signs. It's also hard to make sense of a system of signs that has no use. So we need organisms and a world in which they strive. — hanaH

Language-games were still in their infancy in the Blue Book.

I want to say that the interesting thing about a language-game is that the sense an utterance (or gesture or other action) makes is obvious. But it's still just a reminder.

More specifically, I think language-games are supposed to be occasions of language use stripped of the non-essential so that the sense of them becomes obvious.

There's a story about Capablanca walking by a board where two masters were analyzing a difficult ending, considering several strategies and lots of lines. Capablanca stopped, moved several pieces on the board to new squares and removed some pieces, and then walked away. What was left on the board was a position that was obviously a win for white, and it was position white could obviously force eventually.

I think that's what a language-game is supposed to be. In real life, the sense of things may be obscured by all sorts of other considerations and complexities. Strip all that away and you don't wonder whether something makes sense or how an exchange works; it's obvious.

It seems you're not sure we know we're on firm ground until we get down to the biological, the material conditions of life, to something we might even do science with. I don't think Wittgenstein feels that need.

a largely refuted reference theory. — hanaH

By that, do you mean not all language usage is referential, or that no language usage is referential?

language ... can be used for very many different things, perhaps things we can yet not imagine. — StreetlightX

Yes.

(I want to note, in passing, that taking "things" quite narrowly, as sentences, this is obviously and shockingly true; I suppose we could do research on this, or someone has, but I assume that the majority, and perhaps the overwhelming majority, of sentences an individual utters have never been uttered before and will never be uttered again, so varied are the occasions of meaning something by saying something. But here we're talking about types or ways of meaning something by saying something.)

1. Is it possible that we could catalog all of the known uses of language, as Austin desired? Yes. Even if that number was on the order of, say, 10^4, it could be done; he thought getting to 17 or so and then saying, "the possibilities are infinite" was giving up. He compared the enterprise to cataloging species; of course, if it's like that, then the possibility of discovering another one is not worrying, as you needn't claim that your catalog is exhaustive. Its finitude, though, is a matter not just of physics, as even the finitude of historical utterances will turn out to have been, when it's all over for us, but also of terrestrial biology, which is various but not infinitely so.

2. Which naturally leads to something like @hanaH's view that all of these uses and possible uses, even the ones we can't imagine now, have something in common: they are solutions to a coordination problem faced by living creatures like us.

But of course that is quite definitely a theory of language.