[lit-ideas] Re: Sounds right to me
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2008 16:15:59 -0330
Would anyone know of a source on Wittgenstein who examines why W believed that
meaning and knowledge are not possible independent of language games, and what
W specifically meant by that claim?
Walter O
MUN
Quoting Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>:
> Donal wrote
>
> 'The Wittgensteinian bias I sense in Phil's demurral is the Wittgenstein
> who says his function is to teach us "differences". Well, is this a
> wrong thing to teach? - not, surely, if it is a corrective to an
> excessive "craving for generality"? But even "differences" can only be
> pointed out against a background of putative "similarities" - otherwise,
> pointing out the differences would be as redundant as my here explaining
> that I am not Robert Paul or Eric Yost. And for the differences to be
> "corrective", they must be valid in themselves and also valid as a
> challenge to the alleged similarity (e.g. to say that an elephant is
> different to a grey fox is not a valid challenge to the "similarity"
> 'both those animals are grey').'
>
> RP: I'm not sure where one finds Wittgenstein saying that his 'function'
> (odd word) is to 'teach us differences.' One of his aims in the 'later'
> works is to try to keep us from assimilating things to other things
> (which language has misled us into thinking they resemble), and then
> constructing theories or generalizations by means of such false
> analogies without noticing the differences between a particular case
> and those it's mistakenly thought to resemble. Examples of his
> attempting to show how language misleads us into such false analogies
> abound in the Investigations.
>
> In the Blue Book, he mentions two philosophical illnesses (I think he
> calls them that): the craving for generality, and the contempt for the
> particular case. (Socrates didn't think that offering particular
> examples was even a preliminary answer to his questions.)
>
> Donal: This Wittgensteinian bias is, I suggest, linked to a dubious
> philosophy of language that sees language (and therefore 'sense' and
> 'thought') as governed by 'rules' that can be _shown_ but not _said_ -
> and where getting a feel for the 'rules' involves being 'shown'
> differences which, if ignored, lead us astray and into nonsense (e.g.
> the difference between the 'grammar' governing talk of physical objects
> and that of mental 'objects').
>
> RP: The first part of this is anachronistic. That language is everywhere
> governed by rules (viz., by its underlying logic) is his view in the
> Tractatus, and it's a view that he began to reject in the early 1930's
> (he called it dogmatic). The talk about the 'grammar' of certain words
> and concepts is not part of his earlier views about the necessary
> isomorphism between language, logic, and the world. It is part of a
> rejection of them.
>
> Robert Paul,
> waiting for the Big Freeze,
> near Reed College
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