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.

My basic assumption is that philosophical thinking yields meaningful results. — Hanover

Is studying the history of philosophy the same thing as philosophical thinking?

If we start from the position, as I do, that there are two distinguishable disciplines here, then we can look at how they inform each other. For anything beyond textual work, I think being able to do philosophy, to think clearly about philosophical issues, is necessary for interpreting and explicating philosophical works. The dependency in that direction seems perfectly clear.

It's the other direction that is causing us trouble, and I think I can now gloss my use of "great" in previous posts: a work that is worth allowing yourself to be influenced by. That's still circular, but at least it's clearer that "greatness" is measured in how it informs your philosophical thinking, that it's about the chosen dependence of practice on history.

It's possible to reject the whole idea that there are two disciplines -- there are people who punt and just define philosophy as whatever philosophers do, whatever philosophers have done -- so there would not be two disciplines just one, and that would in effect make the history primary. It simplifies things, to treat philosophy as a kind of literature, but I don't think it's just that anymore than it's a science. We teach it nearly as if it's literature though, except for the logic courses which we treat as science.

I'll stop there -- but I do want to register my reservations about the word "results".

The part of that post I feel bad about is its reliance on the word "great", as in "great minds", "great works". I think West has a way to gloss that, and I might if I tried. As it stands, I'm only saying that we can derive value from studying the sorts of works value can be derived from, which blows.

Can't solve every problem in every post.

The question is whether philosophical thought is advanced by increased rigor, which would require one be intimately familiar with the underlying issues, the prior objections raised by prior philosophers, and what those responses have been. — Hanover

No. Leaving aside "underlying" --- because I don't know exactly what it's doing there --- this is like arguing that the only way to get from your house to the Waffle House is by studying all the routes people have taken from their house when in search of a Waffle House.

You may learn 10,000 ways of not making a lightbulb before you make one, but 100 would have done as well. There may be other things to learn from those other 9,900 ways not to make a lightbulb, some of those 'failures' may provide unique opportunities for insight, but there are always a vast number of ways to fail so you can't define success as trying all of the wrong ways. The last part of your sentence is just not so intimately connected to the idea of rigor as you seem to think it is.

Understanding the issue you want to address, yes, of course, and otherwise you're not addressing it. Knowing what everyone has said about it, no, not even what everyone thinks are the important things that have been said about it. That makes you an expert on what people have said about it, and that is not the same thing as rigor.

It is confusing that so much of the academic practice of philosophy, from coursework to publishing, is actually the history of philosophy, but that doesn't make them the same thing. In the sciences, from mathematics to physics to medicine, history is not the central focus of study as it is in academic philosophy. If that's our model, why don't we follow it?

If I have the opportunity to speak with Person A who has read the pertinent literature and has taken course work and written papers with regard to Issue X or Person B who has only generally considered Issue X, but has read next to nothing and has taken no coursework and not written on the Issue, I'd choose Person A for the more meaningful response. — Hanover

You'll get a response that is more comprehensive, more informed of the current state of the academic study of philosophy, certainly. Whether it will be more "meaningful", whether it will be "better", is unclear. This is just "looking where the light is best", isn't it?

If we accept the notion that we're all on equal footing just by virtue of our natural intelligence and worldly wisdom — Hanover

I'm saying it's possible to disagree with @T Clark's view without mistaking the current academic practice of philosophy for philosophy.

I like the idea of soul-forming education. — T Clark

Cornel West does claim that there is benefit to studying the great minds of the past, and makes that claim exactly in the context of a critique of the current state of academia.

In my opinion, knowing that this philosopher said one thing and another something else is of limited importance. What is important is knowing how to think along with and evaluate what is said. But by doing the former one may increase her ability to do the latter. That others have thought about these things, and often with more insight than we have is not a resource that should be ignored. — Fooloso4

Reading a great work of philosophy is not only of value for improving your own thinking, it is also a pleasure. Like all pleasures, a matter of temperament, even taste, but also one for which nothing else can substitute.

there are journalistic standards that one must adhere to in order to be published — Hanover

From the Cornel West piece that @jamalrob linked:

Howard University is not removing its classics department in isolation. This is the result of a massive failure across the nation in “schooling,” which is now nothing more than the acquisition of skills, the acquisition of labels and the acquisition of jargon. Schooling is not education. Education draws out the uniqueness of people to be all that they can be in the light of their irreducible singularity. It is the maturation and cultivation of spiritually intact and morally equipped human beings.

The removal of the classics is a sign that we, as a culture, have embraced from the youngest age utilitarian schooling at the expense of soul-forming education. To end this spiritual catastrophe, we must restore true education, mobilizing all of the intellectual and moral resources we can to create human beings of courage, vision and civic virtue. — Cornel West

You offered @T Clark one of the standards for being a professional academic philosopher, but there's clearly room for doubt that this is the sort of standard he was asking for, and what Cornel West suggests here might be closer to the mark, something that might be pursued by academic institutions but that, West says here categorically, is not.

This whole discussion might have benefited from distinguishing two issues: @T Clark's regularly avowed discomfort with the Western philosophical tradition, and the professionalization of philosophy in academic institutions. It is perfectly obvious how the professionalization of empirical disciplines advances them, as those require tremendous resources to make progress, halting and uncertain as that progress may be. It is not obvious, not to me anyway, that the same model has been well applied to the arts or to philosophy.

The interesting comparison is mathematics, always the odd duck. Mathematics may not require expensive research facilities (no large hadron colliders needed) or hordes of grad students to do the grunt work of research, but to do original work requires a tremendous amount of quite specialized education. Is the same true of philosophy?

If I am to act in such a way that you will be affected by my actions, it is moral for me to consider how you will feel about my actions.

I may not choose to act in a way that you like: my actions may affect another or many others and I might weight their feelings more heavily; I may act contrary to your short-term wishes in furtherance of what I believe are your long-term wishes; and there are many, many other complications.

But not to consider you at all, in fact to refuse categorically to consider how you will feel about my actions, is not to grant you a status equal to my own as a fellow moral agent deserving such consideration, is, in short, not to treat you as a person.

if language games are ways of seeing how utterances can make sense, then theologies, religions and poetry would all count as language games, unless you wanted to claim that no sense is made in some or all of those disciplines. — Janus

You're still asking the wrong question -- as bolded -- at least as we're trying this out.

Early Wittgenstein had a doctrine -- I think, am I remembering this right? or is this just a Vienna Circle thing -- about what might make a statement senseless. Later Wittgenstein, it always seems to me, denies the presumption of sense, and instead of a bin marked "senseless" to chuck things in, he has an in-basket of things that have not yet been given sense, not yet shown to be meaningful.

Dumb example: a philosopher asks, "How do I know that tree there is real?" and presumes that the question makes sense, because, because, well, it's grammatical English. Does it make sense? There's no answer to that right off, not even the answer that it is senseless. You can say, well, if I lived next-door to a Hollywood backlot, I might very well look out my window and wonder if the tree I'm looking at is real.

That much you could get from Austin, showing you a situation in which it would be quite clear what is meant by asking if a tree is real. Since that's clearly not what the philosopher thinks he meant, the burden is his to show us a situation in which his meaning would be that clear. Insofar as there is a standard to meet, a paradigm to measure up to, it's ordinary language. It's not that only ordinary language is permissible, but that if you hope to be making sense, you hope to be making sense the way ordinary language does.

That would be the sense in which Wittgenstein is only offering reminders, not a theory. He doesn't offer a new standard, one he just made up himself and is satisfied with, of how to decide whether some utterance is meaningful. He's offering a way for you to see for yourself, a way of looking in which it will be perfectly clear whether it's meaningful.

I really think that means that Wittgenstein, unlike the logical positivists, gives you no grounds for dismissing religious speech, for example, as meaningless. But he does deny you the presumption that it is meaningful. If it is woven into the fabric of people's lives, if whether you say this or you say that is consequential for them, if it is as plain to the members of a faith community what their religious speech means as "Would you pass the salt?" is to 'us', outsiders to that faith, then what is there to say?

If, on the other hand, you ask your friend the believer a question about his faith and he gives you an answer that, let's say, "feels" like it's just as abstract or vague or insubstantial as your question, and as you question each answer you get some similar-feeling verbiage each time, so that you feel like you're digging a hole in mud, never making any progress... Yeah, you might begin to suspect that he doesn't know what his faith means any better than you. All he's got is words he says that you don't, and they only connect to other words he says that you don't, a machine that runs alright but has no evident function.

As a poet, you might want to build exactly that sort of machine. (William Carlos Williams defines "poem" as "a small machine, made of words".) --- No need to get into that here. --- But as a philosopher, you want to avoid doing that. I think part of what Wittgenstein is after is how it is possible to build such a useless machine, how it can be done without realizing it, and whether there are ways of thinking -- perhaps even ways we cannot completely avoid!-- that are particularly likely to lead to pointless machine building.

Around here I'm reaching the limits of even guessing though...

This makes me wonder whether, on your interpretation, Wittgenstein would count religions or theologies as language games. — Janus

That is exactly the sort of question I think might be wrongheaded, and it's the sort of question a lot of us have felt ourselves wanting to ask after reading Wittgenstein. (For instance, I believe he nowhere says that philosophy "is a language-game".)

But what if there's no ontology here at all, no saying this practice here, this is a language-game, but that one isn't? What if language-games are just a sort of flashlight (remember this, @Banno?) you can shine on the thinking and talking and so on that people do? What if, instead of saying that the language-game is that which gives sense to an utterance or a word used in an utterance -- what if we only said that language-games are a way of seeing how an utterance can make sense, how a word can be given sense by being used in such a way? Not a question of what's there -- is this or that a language-game? -- but of how we look at language use.

The methods used in the PI is more valuable than the theory expounded. — Banno

Than what theory?

Either there is no theory to be "less valuable" or Wittgenstein is wrong about what he was doing. Which is it?

@InPitzotl pointed out the intimate connection between space and vision. Something else worth considering is the relation between other sensible qualities and time. No sound without time, without movement. Gazing at an object we can imagine we are seeing the object as it simply is, not in its doing something. Persisting doesn't seem like something an object *does*.

I just don't think post-facto justifications like "it was worthwhile" justify actually starting those set of harms for someone else. — schopenhauer1

Somebody has to decide. You could say I must have children because they'll be glad I did; I could say you must not because they won't be. Is one of us right?

If I'm buying you a gift, I subordinate my tastes to yours: the question is not whether I would like this, or whether I think you *should* like this, but whether I think you will. With potential children, we have plenty of reason to expect they will think life worthwhile.

The asymmetry argument should be placed here. If we're right in thinking our kids will think life worth it, all good; if we're wrong, we will feel guilty. Reversing that: if we're right thinking, against the odds, that our children wouldn't think life worth it, then we've spared them that experience; if we're wrong, and they would've thought life worth it, we needn't feel guilty because by not existing they don't experience missing out.

There is a natural way to read "language-games" as an enlarging of Frege's context principle, and along with that you might see "grammar" as enlarging the idea of logical form. Frege and Russell demonstrated that surface grammar is not a sure guide to the logical form of a statement, and it's the logical form that shows you the role of a word. You could see LW doing something similar.

But there's a problem with that reading: it has Wittgenstein offering an improved theory of language, when he seems to be adamant that he's not offering a theory. Something's wrong if you end up saying, the problem with philosophy is an incorrect theory of language, here's the correct one, problem solved.

There's reason to think Wittgenstein was already convinced, at the time of the Tractatus, that philosophy is largely a confusion brought on by misunderstanding language, and in this he is not alone. He thought then that the solution was logical analysis, a process that reveals the underlying logical form of our statements.

One way to read the Tractatus is as an explanation of why logical analysis works, or at least showing what the world must be like for logical analysis to work. When we come to the latter Wittgenstein, we see 'grammatical analysis', the exploration of utterances through imagining the language-game they might belong to, but it does seem like the Tractarian 'metaphysical' bit, if that's what it is, is missing, or at least elusive, so we're tempted to grab "forms of life" and stick it in there.

But if that's right, why doesn't Wittgenstein just say so? I mean, he kinda does, here and there, but why does he insist he's not offering a theory? Is he mistaken about that? Is he actually offering a theory about language? If he's mistaken about that, surely that's pretty interesting, and we should all be talking about why LW doesn't think his theory is a theory.

I don't have a simple answer here, but one thing worth considering is taking language-games (and grammar and forms of life, all that) not as a theory but as a philosophical technique. A language-game is at least a way to show the reader what Wittgenstein wants them to see. (Just as Frege invented the Begriffschrift as a way to show the difference between concept and object, not as a claim that this is the notation everything is *really* written in.)

Actually, I'm hoping that someone will make a good case that I should be reading those books. — T Clark

I can do that, a bit.

There is at least this: you can read philosophy, even systematic philosophy, not with the intention of "getting the answers", but only with the intention of watching another mind at work, an interesting mind, one hopes. I could say you can learn to think "better" by doing this, but it's not a matter of picking up re-usable techniques. It's certainly not a matter of adopting or rejecting whatever specific doctrine the writer is putting forth, if any.

That might seem strange because, going by this forum, people seem to think philosophy is almost entirely a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with someone else, or with some statement, or with some argument. That's the least interesting part of philosophy for me, and I try not to spend much time doing that. The more interesting part is learning to think differently. Sometimes that's trying out different terms and categories, a specific change like that; sometimes it's seeing an entirely different sort of approach to an issue or a problem.

You can get, from a book of philosophy, some specific alternatives to try out, but more valuable to me, I think, is just the example of working out such an alternative, to show that it's possible and how it can be done.

There's an, what I like to describe as, arbitrariness to words. — TheMadFool

Saussure liked to describe it that way too. All of linguistics since Saussure likes to describe it that way.

And Shakespeare:

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet

You can go back to the Cratylus for some arguments pro and con.

Grice distinguished between natural meaning (clouds mean rain) and non-natural meaning ("clouds" in English means clouds).

There's a bit more to Wittgenstein than recognizing the arbitrariness of the sign.

people believe they are doing what is best when they select some solution to their problems — Average

There.

Probably because they think that they already know what is best — Average

Well, no.

even if this is true I don’t think that it follows from it that people wouldn’t still try to justify their decisions with reasons — Average

Of course not. The issue is optimization vs satisficing.

Srap is right in saying — Banno

I was describing my guess at MU's view, so you agree with him rather than me.

Better a question that can't be answered than an answer that can't be questioned.

(I think that was Feynman.)

Ah, I misread you. — Luke

I habitually write in the voices of other people without making it obvious I'm doing so. Need to work on that. (Though I can't imagine giving up these little embedded dialogs. Can you imagine the Investigations without all the other voices?)