[Wittrs] Children and Family Resemblance

(Responding to a point offered by Larry Tapper below)

If a child learns the word "dog" by seeing a furry animal on all fours, with 
the father pointing and saying "dog," and then the child later points to a cow 
and says "dog," there is no issue here. This is because the child hasn't learnt 
"dog" yet. The process of learning it is still going on. You only know a word 
when you can exchange it successfully in the language marketplace. The child is 
trying to play the word "dog" with the sense of "beast," which doesn't trade 
for value in our games. At least not currently. You can't redeem it. 

This isn't to take away anything that the child has said. For properly 
understood, what he has said is "beast," it's just he cannot (yet) be 
understood by anyone else except his father (parents?). In this case, his 
father can understand because of his status as a connoisseur of the boy's 
behavior. (See imponderable evidence). This particular language game, between 
father and son, is probably not unlike one where Jim Kirk says, "Scotty, when I 
say General Order 24, blow up the ship." So it is not that the child's sense of 
"dog" is not playing somewhere; it is that it cannot play anywhere else, and 
the child obviously does not intend to speak in code when pointing out the 
"beast." Hence the need for more social learning.  

Note that, in middle English, the word "deer" had this exact grammar. It could 
mean a deer or a furry sort of animal thing. Because Middle English really 
isn't "English," we wouldn't call this, I think, an archaic sense. I think we 
would call it not our language. 

And so, what has happened here is that the child has said, in effect, "beast," 
using the wrong word. 

This is quite different from the example I gave here (see link below), where a 
teenager called a dolphin a "fish." In this expression, the child is merely 
saying that the dolphin looks "fishy," which is true. The child isn't 
contradicting science: he isn't saying that it doesn't breathe air, nurse its 
young, have warm blood, etc. He is simply saying something about the way it 
looks. And because this use has value in the language market -- because it is 
intelligible to others in that circumstance -- it has the meaning that it does 
in that use. 

http://ludwig.squarespace.com/lecture-topics/2012/4/5/0392-answers-to-problem-set-1.html
(go to 1:53)

Here is a better example of child learning and family resemblance. The father 
brings home a small red child chair. The child sits in it and his face glows. 
The father says "chair." Two days later, the child sits on a living room 
beanbag, his face glowing, and says to his father: "chair!" There will be no 
social correction here. For his idea exchanges quite well in the language game, 
as you can evidence with a google image search of "chair" here:     

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=chair&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1280&bih=845&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=xcnXT8qoB6no2QX0j4mDDw


Regards and thanks.

Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
Assistant Professor
Wright State University
Personal Website: http://seanwilson.org
SSRN papers: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=596860
Wittgenstein Discussion: http://seanwilson.org/wittgenstein.discussion.html

________________________________
From: larry_tapper_2 <Philscimind@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: philscimind@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2012 8:28 AM
Subject: Re: [Serious Phil] Wittgenstein, Kripke and Names


 That's an especially pertinent question vis-a-vis Sean's exposition, which 
appeals to communicative success as a criterion of meaning. When a child points 
to a leaping dolphin and says "Look at the fish!" everyone understands, and it 
is not unreasonable to say that the child has uttered a true sentence, measured 
by loose colloquial standards as opposed to narrow scientific standards.

But consider the smaller child in the typical stages of first language 
acquisition. One common pattern is to learn 'dog' by ostension, provisionally 
generalize the concept to cover all animals, then point to a cow and say 
"Doggie!" In that situation, we laugh but we still understand perfectly. But it 
is far less tempting to say 'dog' is a family resemblance concept which somehow 
includes cows in the fuzzy border regions of usage.            

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