[Wittrs] Re: Games with Logic and Bachelor
- From: "jrstern" <jrstern@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2010 03:58:29 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@...> wrote:
>
> ... actually, no. The game IS THE RESEMBLANCE.
That tells me nothing.
> (And the resemblance isn't visual either, in case that is around the corner,
> although visual similarity can play a role in it). And so if the resemblance
> is remote or contrived or arbitrary, the play won't score a goal or be very
> good. Who decides on what is resemblance? It isn't an act of politics; its
> one of cognition and social learning.
Again, you are being very free with terms that have no foundation.
Are you familiar with how children actually learn?
They do make funny category errors. I forget the proper terms of art, but they
make magnitude errors, so that very big and very small fall in the same
category, they might say "big" to both.
The point is, the normative decisions are one game, but the mechanics of the
process are another.
> Again, I am lost as to the points you want to make. Is Turing the one who
> called the kitty a cow?
I don't think so.
Fodor goes on about horse and cow at great length, if you like.
> The only way you could get "kitty" into cow under warrant of "mammal" is
> to have a culture of speakers who did not know much of mammals and who
> thought kitties to be the popular of the species. Imagine a group of Aliens
> who speak poor English. The two alien children see a cow and say "kitty,"
> meaning, in essence, major-mammal.
My point, such as it is, is, again, that you assume there is a reference to
your game, such that we do it one way and aliens another.
This is not a point that Turing made explicitly with Wittgenstein, but it is
one that I believe follows from the difference in their works. Once one sees
there are two games going, one can reconcile Turing and Wittgenstein, I believe.
> (I have a colleague who studies wolfs as endangered species. Because I know
> nothing of the matter, I frequently refer to his pet project as studying
> "that dog." This is the only thing that comes close to describing what I mean
> about the aliens above. For you to play the language game you want to play,
> certain conditions on the ground have to exist. You don't have them).
Well, that's actually a rather pertinent example, isn't it?
> Like I say, we could invent one not involving mammal as the entry port.
> Imagine a child calling a kitty a cow if it is incredibly obese. That's a
> goal in the language game. Without more, your example isn't a goal, it's a
> confusion. And as such, it isn't a counter example to anything anyone has
> said.
I just get twitchy when you say "THE language game".
As I, and others, get twitchy when Wittgenstein makes it a GAME.
Certainly there are game aspects, but that seems not entirely grounded, seems
to leave out - y'know, the world.
Which leads others to go for neo-essentialists like Kripke.
My preference is to recognize the game and its contexts in the world, or
something along those lines.
Want to avoid, in Sellars' phrase, the "myth of the given".
Gotta run.
Josh
=========================================
Need Something? Check here: http://ludwig.squarespace.com/wittrslinks/
Other related posts:
