[Wittrs] Kripke's Language Game Solved
- From: Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2010 15:46:45 -0800 (PST)
... oh gosh, I'm writing this paper and all the walls have come crashing down.
I've bulldozed everything!!!
I've just hog-tied Kripke.
People often wrongly think that the idea of water = H20 is an idea
about "water." It is not. It is an idea about water MOLECULES. And for any
amount of water, there must be numerous molecules present. Imagine a glass of
water. How many molecules would be there? For the sake of pure fun, let's just
say 100,000,000. If we were to "name" these molecules, we would give them an
identifier that individuated them, like we do with humans. Maybe it would be
something like wm00001 wm00002 and so forth. But we have absolutely no need to
name them. So instead, science tells us that the molecules are composed of a
certain basic chemical structure (H20). And now, the revelation: water
molecules are H20.
What is the significance of this to language? I want to suggest it is this. It
is a way to introduce a bearer-call that can NEVER become a bearer-assignment,
because bearers now take the logical form of the X's of N, rather than the
X of N. With "names," bearer-calls always take on the form of the X of N.
That's the purpose of names: individuating. But with this sort of
creation, which is not a "name" but a particular kind of scientific jargon, the
language game has the structure of bearers-called (plural).
Example: what is it that separates all of the humans on the planet from other
life forms? What can be said to be the thing that calls to all the bearers? And
here, we don't want things like general descriptions, pointing, or titles -- we
want markers (branding). That's the key. Branding is such that all of the
bearers (plural) call by the same "marks." Presumably, this is a genetic or
DNA sort of thingy (I'm not a scientist! I'm a languagologist. That's a funny).
And so there you have Kripke's language game, in a nutshell. The name of the
game is bearers-called by markings. It would be the same sort of thing as
playing 5-card draw with A's high. That is, that is the rule of the game. It's
bearers-call by markings. Notice if that if we try to ascribe commonality to
the bearers, we get category words. That's not the idea; we want all the things
that can be said to share the same markings common to them all. That's what the
rules of the game are. Because of this, several things follow: (a) the words
that obey these rules do not develop sense in the language game; and (b) it is
impossible to play bearer-assignment with them because of the very way the game
is set up. For this reason, certain aspects of the language of science resist
family resemblance. Furthermore, this isn't revelation more than it is
tautological (it is no surprise).
Comments?
(J I'm going to have to thank you in the paper for helping me get these
thoughts clarified. I'm sure more of this is need of coming if you are
interested)
Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
Assistant Professor
Wright State University
Personal Website: http://seanwilson.org
SSRN papers: http://ssrn.com/author=596860
Discussion Group: http://seanwilson.org/wittgenstein.discussion.html
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