[Wittrs] Re: Games with Logic and Bachelor
- From: "jrstern" <jrstern@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:19:33 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@...> wrote:
>
> Here's what I think you aren't getting. Definitions don't prescribe the use
> of words, behavior does. What are commonly called definitions in dictionaries
> are nothing but accounts of these uses. Sort of like a newspaper for the
> language game. No one I know of would credibly say that if a use was
> meaningfully understood that it couldn't be made because the dictionary
> didn't yet have it. And so, for the idea of calling Tiger a "bachelor" to be
> a joke can only be true IN A SENSE OF TALKING. You are observing a fence
> again. You use the word "bachelor" and "marriage" with a fence in both yards.
> That's fine. You're allowed. Many people do. Your point is taken. But what
> you don't understand is that if people use these words without such fences,
> they too are allowed whatever goals they score.
Well, I wonder.
If your child says, "Look at the kitty!" and points at a cow,
that must tell us something about indexicals and speech acts and
Wittgensteinian grammars and Quinian empiricism, but does it not
rather get crosswise with what we know of kitties and cows?
In just what game is the goal scored?
We're all supposed to know, from early on, that marks on paper,
sounds in the air, have no _inherent_ meaning but what some person
or persons make of them. Why must we constantly rediscover this?
And then, the lesson once more fresh in mind, then what?
Josh
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