Writes an incoherent book complaining that language is too incoherent

...

Maybe you're just too dumb to understand him :^)

>complaining that language is too incoherent

>whatever can be said can be said clearly and whereoff one cannot speak thereoff one must be silent.

Yet he still says we should use a complicated system to determine if a propsition is true, when simple verification or deduction would do

Ad hominems am I right?

Go on then, tell me why his system works.

>Writes an incoherent book complaining that language is too incoherent
q.e.d.

He DOES say that verification is how we determine the truth of propositions, samefag

Read the book

Ah yes, a good effort. However this conclusion falls into induction fallacy. Just because he was incoherent, doesn't mean that all language is incoherent

But the proposition that verification is how we are to determine truth is in itself unverifiable.

Just like every proposition in the book, hence the ladder metaphor in 6.54

Of course an academic who isn't writing to someone educated in the subject is going to write in specific language, that otherwise would be incoherent to someone not in the field

This is like a fucking kindergarten question holy shit what is happening to Veeky Forums

>induction fallacy
only if you can name a counter-example

Just read Wittgenstein's Nephew by T. Berndhard. Was comfy.

> sez he solved philosophy
> people praise him
> "y-you don't understand me!"
> runs away
> sez he solved philosophy (again) and this time for real
> people don't fully get it
> sez Anscombe (known Thomist) understands his work the best, so well that she doesn't even have to know German to be the one he assigns to translate the Philosophical Investigations

tl;dr "I like Catholics and wanna be a peasant sometimes but I'm filthy rich"

he was using language so you've just proved his point

What does he mean by "family resemblances" and what's a definition to him?

Contrary to popular belief, it's not a technical term and isn't even that important in the overall scheme of the book. He was just saying when you try to strictly define some concepts, like "game", you find there isn't an essence common to all things called "games" but a variety of overlapping similarities, KIND OF LIKE A FAMILY RESEMBLANCE; different members might have similar eyes, similar hair, similar nose, etc., but there isn't a single essential trait common to them all.

So, was he right in saying that whatever can be said at all can be said clearly? and does this mean that we can't talk about metaphysics?

He said that in the Tractatus, which he changed his mind about. But we still can't talk about metaphysics, but for other reasons

What do you mean? Of course we can talk about metaphysics, people talk about metaphysics all the time. Do you want to take "can't" as a prescriptive "shouldn't," or do you want to take "can't" as implying "can't sensibly"?

Family resemblances has been pretty well covered, but lets say for definitions that instead of looking for one type of thing that we call a definition we might instead acknowledge that there are numerous different types of definitions! We open up a chess set, point to a piece and say" what does this thing do" - a definition is a list of different rules for its movement. But if we point to the board itself, or a timing clock and say "what does this thing do?" we would expect to have a different type of definition.

Similarly, the way a noun like "chair" is defined works completely differently than a verb like "walk". Trying to find a universal underpinning system for these like 'sense/reference' is misguided.

Go to bed Peter Hacker

the western chuang tzu. why did it take us 2000 years?

It didn't