[Wittrs] Wittgenstein's meaning is use

  • From: CJ <castalia@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:09:57 -0400

Here it happens that our thinking plays us a queer trick. We want, that is, to quote the law of excluded middle and to say: "Either such an image is in his mind or it is not; there is no third possibility!'


We encounter this queer argument in other regions of philosophy. "in the decimal expansion of pi either the group'7777' occurs, or it does not ---there is no third possibility." That is to say, "God sees --but we don't know" But what does that mean? We use a picture; the picture of a visible series which one person sees the whole of and another not. The law of excluded middle says here: It must either look like this, or like that.

So it really -- and this is a truism ---says nothing at all, but gives us a picture. And the problem ought now to be: does reality accord with the picture or not? And this picture SEEMS to determine what we have to do, what to look for, and how ---but it does not do so, just because we don't not know how it is to be applied.

Here saying, "There is no third possibility" or "But there can't be a third possibility"---expresses our inability to turn our eyes away from this picture: a picture which looks as if it must already contain both the problem and its solution, while all the time we FEEL that it is not so.

Similarly, when it is said "Either he has this experience, or not" --- what primarily occurs to us is a picture which by itself seems to make the sense of the expressions unmistakable: "Now you know what is in question" --we would like to say. And that is precisely what it does not tell him."

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