Reply to CJ: Just a quickie before I disappear again for a few hours.(by a quickie I usually mean a tome, not so hot on being concise). First of all thanks for the comments on thought, I need to think about all that stuff more, but have no time and my brain will soon be petrified. You say: " To me, there is an implicit "natural selection" model which operates in the back of Wittgenstein's mind ...according to which it is the survival of the fittest language games which determine what we see around us and, in turn, the survival of the fittest words in the configuration of each such language game which determines the words we find ourselves using. Meaning is predicated upon this 'fitness" and the fitness the words or expressions contribute to the game of which they are a part." I think the question of pragmatism is very interesting in Witt. The natural selection idea is curious, but how to define fitness?-- Fit, presumably, relative to a given purpose or need. I think that while a region of grammar, a set of conceptual apparatus, will develop to serve certain needs or ends, I think it is a mistake to see them as 'determined' by these needs or ends, if this is meant in the sense that implies we could not have chosen otherwise. We could; that is what is meant by grammar being arbitrary. i guess you mean determined by their *suitability* given the ends or needs which govern the game...well, I still think 'determined' may be too strong, especially when borrowed form a natural selection picture. A conceptual choice may be explained in such a way, but it remains a choice. I am incredibly taken with this example of Peter Hacker's re the development of new grammar, and I will relay it just because I like it really. The issue here is how it is that conceptual choices are determined, and we can look as always at a region of language on the analogy of a game. The example is from tennis: Suppose in the middle of a match a pelican swoops in, seizes the tennis ball and lands it in the opponent's box. Did you win the point? Well, who is to say? There are no rules in the tennis book to deal with what happens when a tropical bird walks onto the court (what an oversight!! the rules must be incomplete!!) . Nothing decides things one way or another. Now if enough pelicans persist in this outlandish behaviour, we will introduce a new rule to say whether I win the point or not. The moral here (one of them) : Experience requires, demands if you like, that a conceptual choice be made, that a new rule be laid down, but what choices we make and what rules we develop is not *determined* by experience or by the need we have of incorporating new experience in our conceptual scheme. I guess there is an argument to say that in many cases, which way we go will be informed by the rules in place already, what kind of developments make most sense given the game as it stands, what would cause least disturbance to it so to speak (at the risk of getting a bit Quinean here!). But there is always a choice. ultimately we make a decision and we would say "this is just what we do"; "this is how the game is played" and there is no more to be explained. 'Why are the rules of tennis as they are?' -- does that question really admit of a sensible answer? So I kinda think that the natural selection idea is not helpful in these ways: 1) when talking about fitness, we could just say that we develop the concepts to suit our needs and purposes in life. 2) there is nothing 'natural' about the selection; these are conceptual decisions. On the other hand, it might be apt in the sense that: 1) there is a question of fitness relative to the purpose 2) there are considerations which will inform and explain our making one conceptual choice and not another -- clearly when we say they are in a deep sense arbitrary we do not mean they are ad hoc, because a game does not hold together as a game then. the considerations however I'd say are logical and conceptual, not natural --though the purposes (some of them) may be naturally determined.(?) One other thing that won't sit I think is talking of 'fittest words' , as if a meaningful word stood apart, were intelligible in abstraction of the network of grammatical rules against which moves are made with it, as if it lay idle but were full of potential power, and could be picked up and put to a use already contained within it (One might talk instead of 'fittest rules'? ). But I take it that you have no such picture of words in mind, and what you mean is that in a given game it could be useful to invent a new piece (of course the piece is defined with ref to rules for its use) with which we could make cartain new moves? does that sound roughly right? We probably have no dispute, and I'm just being pedantic... N. PS: You're quite right in fact in calling me Natasha as this is my given name. However I've never really used it (grew up in Spain); I'm Nasha/Nacha ( a sort of nick-name if you like) or Natalia :)