Since you elected to include reference to my off-list e-mailed comment on the issue of language being open-ended with regard to the implication of the idea of rule-following for understanding usages, I suppose there's no reason I shouldn't post some of what I said on-line in a more public way so here, at least, are the relevant portions: "You know, I actually think Glen has a point, Sean. . . . he is right, on my view, re: the fact that you can't have an anything goes scenario in language. Yes, language is flexible and there are many games we 'play' within it and part of what Wittgenstein wanted to say was that that is how these things work. But he did also point out that terms can be misused and that that causes problems and misuse occurs when we break the rules of the pertinent game. To some extent language is open-ended and we are constantly evolving new games to go with the old but there must be places where words fall into the wrong pool of uses if we are to be able to communicate with one another (there must be right and wrong ways to say things). I think you are sometimes too facile in dealing with this distinction. "I also think Glen's right about your use of 'brain scripts' and 'languaging'. Yes language is behavioral as Wittgenstein pointed out but there's a reason 'languaging' sounds odd to us, a reason it is not part of ordinary language, not a verb. I don't think much gets added by attempting to turn it into one -- or to refocus behavioral observations on whatever it is brains do (which we don't know and, even if we did in a scientific way, would not be part of the observational criteria toward which our ordinary linguistic usages are directed). ". . . I think I know where you are coming from, that you are pointing out that language is a complex of practices, is highly flexible and is never fixed in any finite fashion. But the way you put some of this is easily misread, lending fuel to Glen's fire." My point, in the above, was to suggest that perhaps Sean overstates his case at times though I do agree that language rules are not hard and fast and that we err when we try to treat them that way. I'm just not sure as going as far as to say it's all a matter of fences and if we take them down we take them down. Some fences can't be taken down without violating sense. You can't make distinctions without fences in cases like this, even if where we place them is somewhat aribtrary, contingently dependent on a shared consensus within a community of language users. SWM ========================================= Need Something? Check here: http://ludwig.squarespace.com/wittrslinks/