Philosophy and Literature Blog

     Wittgenstein goes on and on about inexact vs. exact. On and on and then writes: "Logic lay, it seemed, at the bottom of all the sciences. -- For logical investigation explores the nature of all things. It seeks to see to the bottom of things and is not meant to concern itself whether what actually happens is this or that --- It takes its rise ... from an urge to understand the basis, or essence, of everything empirical."(Wittgenstein, Section 89) Later he writes, remember he is talking about things he really rejects: "...we eliminate misunderstandings by making our expressions more exact; but now it may look as if we are moving towards a particular state, a state of complete exactness; and as if this were the real goal of our investigation."(Wittgenstein, Section 91) But I take it from all the subjunctive and conditional statements and so on that he is rejecting the program of seeing past rough, inexact language, like the broad strokes in a Van Gogh (ha...

"F.P. Ramsey once emphasized in conversation with me that logic was a 'normative science'. I do not know exactly what he had in mind, but it was doubtless closely related to what only dawned on me later: namely, that in philosophy we often compare the use of words with games and calculi which have fixed rules, but cannot say that someone who is using language must be playing such a game. -- But if you say that our languages only approximate to such calculi you are standing on the very brink of a misunderstanding. For then it may look as if what we were talking about were an ideal language."(Wittgenstein, Section 81) So, in philosophy perhaps philosophers 'correct' common sense usage or notions, referring to such as the language or thought of 'the vulgar'. But it sounds like Wittgenstein is saying that ordinary usage is its own thing. "logic does not treat of language -- or of thought -- in the sense in which a natural science treats of a n...

     While Wittgenstein is talking about whether the boundary between game and non-game is blurry, he picks up the topic of "seeing what is common". You know, this problem is famous in Plato/Socrates. This is the oldest arrow in Socrates' quiver: "No, tell me what all these things have in common". So this is real philosophy, though sometimes it doesn't feel like it to me.  He talks about different ways of showing someone the color 'yellow ochre' or 'blue', and 'leaf'. He circles back around to wondering about what's in the mind of the user -- we've been here before in the Investigations, but now we have seemingly digressed from games back to this topic, but he's not really, he is applying these thoughts to the notion of game. He says: "What does it mean to know what a game is? What does it mean, to know it and not be able to say it? Is this knowledge somehow equivalent to an unformulated definition? So that if it we...

"Here we come up against the great question that lies behind all these considerations.--For someone might object against me:'You take the easy way out! You talk about all sorts of language-games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-game, and hence of language is: what is common to all these activities, and what makes them into language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of the investigation that once gave you yourself most headache, the part about the general form of propositions and of language.' And this is true.-- Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all, -- but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all 'language'. I will try to explain this."(Wittgenstein, section 65).      Well, ...

     A long time ago I read Parmenides, who talks about how there is the 'way of Being' and the 'way of non-Being', but the way of non-Being is not there to be discussed, so you can't go that way. But what is Being? Well, it's not anything that has a not or non in front of it. Being ends up an infinitely dense sphere, like a black hole, no hair, no nothing. Contemporary thinkers tend not to go this way in their analysis of being, or Being. They look at the place a term has in language, like Quine's "To Be is to be the value of a variable". Wittgenstein references his and Russell's early work. Language, according to this earlier analysis, is decomposable into simples, 'individuals' or 'objects'. Wittgenstein quotes Plato's Theaetetus talking about how simples don't have 'definitions', only names. You name that which is simple, like 'red', but you don't define it, per say.      Wittgenstein worries ov...

"The word 'Excalibur', say, is a proper name in the ordinary sense. The sword Excalibur consists of parts combined in a particular way. If they are combined differently Excalibur does not exist. But it is clear that "Excalibur has a sharp blade" makes sense whether Excalibur is still whole or is broken up. But if "Excalibur" is the name of an object, this object no longer exists when Excalibur is broken in pieces; and as no object would then correspond to the name it would have no meaning. But then the sentence "Excalibur has a sharp  blade" would contain a word that had no meaning, and hence the sentence would be nonsense. But it does make sense; so there must always be something corresponding to the words of which it consists. So the word "Excalibur" must disappear when the sense is analyzed and its place be taken by words which name simples. It will be reasonable to call these words the real names." (Wittgenstein, section 39)...

    After I got my undergrad in philosophy I spent the summer working on a horse farm -- I was part of the 'maintenance' team, they didn't let me near the horses!  -- and I had this boss who would bark commands at me like "Go over there get that thing and take it over there!" while pointing in arbitrary directions. He would get madder and madder as I didn't perform whatever task he had in mind. This, combined with me constantly wrecking his utility truck, backing tractors into it, running it into gates and so on, made for a long summer. One thing's for sure, I never mastered whatever the language game was, but at least I had the good sense not to mention Wittgenstein.      The point is, when someone points at something by way of definition, the person being shown whatever it is has to know what is being pointed at: a shape, a color, and object, a number or whatever. How is it that the learner knows what specifically is being pointe...