For a large class of cases of the employment of the word "meaning" - though not for all - this word can be explained in...

>for a large class of cases of the employment of the word "meaning" - though not for all - this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

what are the exceptions?

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An arbitrary utterance? As if a speaker of another language were talking gibberish?

Or, when someone tries to define said word?

What did he mean by this?

he would just say that had no meaning, unless it was used to reflect pain or something. at the beginning of the book he talks about a pssage from augustine and its description of language as 'ostensive' - like when you point and say a word when first learning to speak. i think maybe he is saying that process pins things down for us as kids just long enough for us to climb up, that his description of language in the tractatus is sometimes applicable when we first are learning, but that once we've gotten up, we can kick the ladder down like he said

what's the meaning of life

I'm not asking for the meaning of "life"

Are you asking for the "meaning" of life then?

That means that the word "meaning" is self-referential?

in a sense

What said

When by using "meaning" you're *not* asking for a word's definition

Mean joker, that one.

Well, a definition is not really the "meaning" of a word as used in language. A definition is simply an analytic paraphrasal that reduces a complex concept to a few simpler concepts.

What noise!

>what did he mean by this

That a flaming arrow that was lit and shot to show the location of the castle so that other could find their way back landed true on a sunny August day.

whats that from

wait what

this is beautiful

Explain?

someone help - ive read this 40 times with no luck. how is he using 'nominalism', and what does he do that he thinks is different? is he saying that nominalosts dont believe in family resemblance?

Basically: Not all the words have reference. "Dog" has reference (the dog), "five" hasn't.

It's like the difference between subjectivism and idealism I guess.

I wrote it. Steal it if you like.
Thanks.

No, reread the first post.

...nah.

A common criticism of Wittgenstein is that he is a mere conventionalist or nominalist. This IS true in a certain sense - he's a nominalist in the sense that he's opposed to some kind of Platonic truth behind words, etched into the cosmos or into our souls.

But it's very incorrect if the accusation of nominalism/conventionalism is taken to mean that Wittgenstein thinks that we, as language-users, freely invent or concoct WORDS to designate THINGS (taken in the loosest possible sense, as literally anything that could be talked or thought about, ever, even indirectly or implicitly).

Try to actually picture in your mind would that would entail. It implies an entire metaphysics, it implies a lot of things about how language works. For it to make sense, the speaker would have to have a THING "in his mind," and then choose or designate a WORD to "stand for" that THING. What does this presuppose? It presupposes the thing. It presupposes that cognition, the engine "behind" language, is more-or-less representationalist and naive.

This is really the crux of Wittgenstein's whole point: He doesn't deny that some kind of cognitive machinery exists. What he's saying is that we should stop implicitly, reflexively, and thus dangerously, assuming things about it when we discuss language. Traditional accounts of sense and reference assume a great deal. Logical empiricism assumes a great deal. Even "simple" language philosophy assumes a great deal.

Wittgenstein doesn't deny that private mental contents exist. He just says that we aren't really talking about them; or rather that we are dragging them in, disingenuously, when we pretend only to talk about language. Language is public in Wittgenstein's view, i.e., what we can meaningfully talk about is the USE of language. We can talk about language by using it. This is why philosophy is not a "meta-language" standing outside language, governing it, but a certain stance toward language, within language. Nominalism would presume a meta-linguistic stance, and would make no sense - it would presume standing outside language to describe its operations. But the only way we have access to the concepts necessary to *meaningfully* talk ABOUT such a stance is IN and THROUGH language.

This is why Wittgenstein is so often paired with Heidegger, Derrida, etc.

What exactly is the problem with cognition being representationalist?

In extremely odd circumstances , such as (in PI) the example of the chair that regularly appears and disappears [is it a chair ? Is it not ?] . These exceptions are also dorm what related to the passage that describes the befuddlement encountered if we were met with a piece of cheese that grows larger and smaller irregularly [how would we go about pricing this? Our standard methods would not work]

>so that other could find their way back
hmmm

>the meaning of a word is its use in the language
This is never the case. The meaning of every word is its use by the person who utters it.

I only mean representationalist in the naive sense that there's some kind of simple one-to-one correlation between reality, our thinking of reality, and others minds' thinking of reality.

Really, the problem lies in the simple idea of: "the same mental contents." If your philosophy of language is implicitly grounded on, implicitly calls in, the idea of "calling forth the SAME mental content in his mind by emitting the right SIGN for that content," the burden of proof is on you to prove what "same" and "contents" are.

Transcendental philosophy already tried this, with the ostensibly much easier, proof-of-concept domains of logic and mathematics, and (practically, if not essentially) failed.

How anyone can take this gibberish seriously is beyond me. Who the fuck cares about this bullshit?

...? That was a totally cogent post, which is such a rarity on this site supposedly dedicated to the sharing of intellectual pursuits. Who the fuck are you and why are you here?

>who the fuck are you and why are you here?
I'm a timeline traveler from the future; the future where philosophy has been freed from the autistic rambling called "philosophy of language".

How about intuitive concepts?

That was Wittgenstein's endgame, though.

Expand a bit, please.

For example time and space. Or "meaning".

I meant expand on what you meant by 'intuitive concepts' and why you think this is interesting, relevant, problematic, etc.

you go on the SEP and go to an article like, "philosophy of architecture" and it's like this book was never published. whole sections on what is and is not an 'architectural object.' is there lag or that just professors needing shit to publish on and trying to find new 'philosophy of x' subjects.

Concepts that are a part of the cognitive mechanism. They would be necessary to acquire, use and respectively talk about language. Are those also "public"?

Well, time and space are some of the first and foremost "concepts" tackled by the transcendental philosophers. In fact, they were considered to be some a priori conditions of thinking ("intuiting" things, determining "things" in sensory intuition) at all, which are then (in causal, not temporal sequence) subjected to conceptual determination. That's the beginning of that long line of "pure" transcendental thinking, that runs from Kant to Husserl: What is thought, how does it work, and what can we say about it and ourselves as a result?

Personally I don't think Wittgenstein would be opposed to speculating and talking about these kinds of things at all. But the answer to your question becomes, "That's very interesting to think about, and you could read Kant through to Husserl and see if you come across any definitive answers." But Heidegger's turn from Husserl was very similar to Wittgenstein's turn from the logical positivists, who sprang from the same Kantian intellectual milieu as Husserl. It's a kind of exasperation with transcendental philosophy and a turn toward language, toward meaning-in-use, historical determinations of Being (rather than transcendental or necessary determinations), and philosophy as immanent critique. So they'd probably answer your question by saying "Go ahead and read Kant and Husserl, and you'll probably end up having the same frustrations we had and winding up talking to us again, at the end."

Personally I think they are still open questions. But they verge on much bigger problems, metaphysical ones of the hard problem of consciousness, problems that are equal parts scientific and mystical.

you seem knowledgeable. why do you think philosophy of mind has only recently taken a central position in philosophy

A case where the meaning of meaning meant something else.

Talking about them is necessary public, in that it takes place in language. Thinking about them is partially public, in that you need concepts (i.e., concepts acquired from language*) to think about them.

* This is why Wittgenstein is so useful. We're already talking about "concepts" being "acquired," again. So what does it even mean? All we can really point to is usage. Wittgenstein: Explanation of meaning always ceases somewhere, always terminates in certainty that some meaning simply *is*.

What you're asking about though is exactly where things get messy. A lot of philosophers would simply say, nope, that's all there is: We get our concepts from being inducted into an historically contingent cloud of meanings, and we use those concepts, and that's it. I (and others) would reply to them, "Well, aren't you making metaphysical presumptions already? You're presuming that the actual person, the Dasein or the transcendental ego or whatever, is just a sieve that collects stable meanings from its surrounding culture. That's still implicitly making a claim about what the 'ego' is." And again, it's messy, because a lot would reply, "You're assuming there's an ego, some kind of 'point' of consciousness, with decisional properties, which is an even bigger assumption!" And then we'd get into an argument about who is assuming more by doing what. And I should admit, I'm currently in the extreme minority by thinking that philosophy needs a return to transcendental thought, particularly the unity of transcendental apperception.

If you're interested in those things, I think you should make it a goal to understand not just the anti-transcendental/anti-subjectivity people, like the French poststructuralists (Derrida), Heidegger, and (sort of) Wittgenstein, but to fully appreciate Kant and the post-critical tradition, and eventually to do a deep reading of Husserl.

I'm a complete dilettante so don't trust anything I say. I do know that analytic philosophy after the 1970s/80s made a hermeneutic turn with increasingly better readings of Wittgenstein and Heideggerian/Derridean thought. So there's kind of paradoxically a greater and greater focus on a subject-oriented perspective of understanding the processes of interpretation and meaning assimilation, despite all those philosophies being officially anti-subjectivity, anti-transcendental ego. So that might be part of it.

I'm not sure about philosophy of mind per se though, especially analytic. I tend to associate that stuff with earlier (1960s~) philosophy of mind, and with horrible garbage like Dennett, and really horrible garbage like cognitive science (or whatever it's currently calling itself).

Also thanks dude.

do u think derrida has anything to say different than a sort of applied wittgenstein

We (philosophers like him) ought not analyse phenomena like thinking, but look and observe how "thinking" is used/applied.

Now, nominalists treat all words, such as "thinking", as names. They don't think there is an object called "thinking" independent of the word, but nevertheless they go on to describe or explain "thinking" as THOUGH it were a name of a thing - they treat the word itself of a kind of thing, a quasi-object. Nominalists still go on as if they were answering the question "What is thinking?" For Wittgenstein, once you've asked the question you've already gone wrong. "Thinking" doesn't have any kind of is-ness.

He's just saying the way nominalists approach it is different to his own

>Words are usually a part of language. Theres only a few cases when words arent a part of language.

Maybe kabbalah, where words are more like arithmetic.
Or maybe the phonetic alphabet. Becuase "zebra" in that sense isnt referring to the animal but rather the sound the first letter makes.

Maybe hes talking about metaphor where a poet that mentions a rose isnt actually referring to the plant but rather the queen of england.

(not him but) if you read Derrida as a Wittgensteinian he ends up being just a kind of wacky postmodern essayist and satirist of philosophy I highly recommend.

it's probably a different sense of the same underlying idea, the underlying idea being what matters. in other words, read continental for the aesthetic appeal but go to analytic for the actual meat.

makes even more sense when you realize derrida is just elaborating heidegger

good post friend

He is user. Witty had autism. His idea of exceptions are metaphors and symbolic algebra.

Coincidentally, i came across this post and thought of a conversation i had with someone about the nature of labels.

That if "playing victim" is a nessicary part to recovery.

They talked about how their life became so much better when they were diagnosed autistic.

I was skeptikal of the whole notion that people can just take a set of behaviors ascribe a label to it and define it as a problem.

I wonder sometimes how human progress would look like without written language, and we instead communicated in painting entire scenes or something.

I hear what you did thar.

Is it typo? Or does he do that on purposeless.

>language creates reality
Not sure Witty would agree with you at all user.

We'd be in space by now.

Like a baby still in the womb can recognise a face? It was a recent study that has me wondering. Maybe I'm off, but maybe what you're thinking of is the location of "concepts" of animals such that might lead to language use? Humans before language, and how we evolved, what cognitive mechanisms were in place?

Thanks for this post.

I know i only put a few things in that post an probably didnt get my entire point across.

But i agree with witty that language is a tool that we use to impose order, that in my opinion is for purposes of control.

I just wish language was more of a 'spiritual' practise, rather than a mechanical and wholly pragmatic one. And one that doesnt leave room for disingeniousness, deciet, or misunderstanding.

Tbh I'm not gay, but I feel somewhat attracted to Wittgenstein. Not physically or anything, but I would probably suck """his""" dick anyway. He's probably literally the most charismatic and interesting person in history.

bump

>Like a baby still in the womb can recognize a face?
I am not convinced you need to be able to think conceptually in order to do that.
>but maybe what you're thinking of is the location of "concepts" of animals such that might lead to language use
Yeah, pretty much, though I myself am not sure exactly what point I am trying to make.
What I am talking about is not just perception of a physical level but on an abstract level. Perceiving something not as a "body" but as an "object", an "object" being something like a schema systematizing the ways we can interact with that "body" or that "body" can in interact with other "bodies" and the results of those interactions. So it is a functional way of thinking. From that perspective we can say that an "object" is something that possesses "meaning" in as far as it possesses a "function" although on that level we are not able to think of "meaning" or "function" as such.
Then on a higher level of abstraction we gain the ability to think of the functional properties of objects themselves as objects i.e. those objects reflect not "bodies" but a relationship between objects (abstract or not). Since language provides a framework of thinking of objects as interrelated only at this level of abstraction does language become possible.
Also, on this level it becomes possible to think of "meaning" as an object since it is an abstract property of objects. Still the meaning of the object itself is something that comes into existence at a lower level of abstraction and precedes language and reflects the functional properties of the object.
Probably.
I am not sure if I should interpret OP as saying that "meaning" only exists on the same abstraction level of language.
Also I wonder if it's alright to conflate "meaning" and "function".
When we think of a "body" as an object we think of its "functional properties".
When we think of the functional properties of the body as an object we also think of their "functional properties" even though they don't possess functional properties in the way a body does. Then in the case of pure abstractions maybe it is appropriate to say that they only possess meaning on an abstract level. Which kind of figures, when you think about it.

It is proposed that concepts contain two types of properties. Context-independent properties are activated by the word for a concept on all occasions. The activation of these properties is unaffected by contextual relevance. Context-dependent properties are not activated by the respective word independent of context. Rather, these properties are activated only by relevant contexts in which the word appears. Context-independent properties form the core meanings of words, whereas context-dependent properties are a source of semantic encoding variability. This proposal lies between two opposing theories of meaning, one that argues all properties of a concept are active on all occasions and another that argues the active properties are completely determined by context. The existence of context-independent and context-dependent properties is demonstrated in two experimental settings: the property-verification task and judgments of similarity. The relevance of these property types to cross-classification, problem solving, metaphor and sentence comprehension, and the semantic-episodic distinction is discussed.

Memory & Cognition
January 1982, Volume 10, Issue 1, pp 82–93
Context-independent and context-dependent information in concepts

A common assumption in traditional accounts is that concepts are context-independent amodal symbols. There are several problems with this view and research is strong in suggesting that conceptual capacities incorporate and are structured in terms of patterns of bodily activity. Talking or thinking about objects have been suggested to imply the reactivation of previous experiences, and the recruitment of the same neural circuits involved during perception and action towards those objects would allow the re-enactment of multimodal information (color, size, width, etc). In principle, the view that concepts are represented through abstract symbols, rather than modality specific features, and cognition requires stable forms of representation should be either dropped or strongly revisited.

plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/#Con

What is an example of context-dependant and context-independant property?
Can't it be said that a context-dependant property is a property of the context itself to the extent that a context is also a concept?
Then the context-independent property of the original concept would be that it can exist in such context.

Do I have to read the Tractatus to understand PI? Also is logic still needed to understand it, just like for the TLP? I've read the first pages, and so far it looks like no prior knowledge is required to understand the text.

I'm usually not concerned with prior readings with continental philosophy (I have a solid preparation), but when it comes to analytic philosophy 99% of what I know becomes useless.

>Do I have to read the Tractatus to understand PI?
No, but I would advise it. Witty himself says in the intro to PI that would have liked to publish them together. Also the notion that he "rejected" the Tract is a meme - the continuities between his early and late work is heavily debated. Re logic: maybe read up a bit about truth tables. The logic parts are gonna be hard regardless but honestly if they go completely over your head just skip those parts lel.

not at all my man

This is not an exception. The passage you are pointing to is meant to show that games are not fully bounded by rules. Rules can come and go and we can make them on the fly.

We currently dont have rules for, is a chair still a chair if it frequently comes in and out of existence, just like we dont have a rule for, is it still a legal move in tennis to throw a ball up 5 miles high for a serve? There are still based on use and rules. Meaning is still derived from use, so it is not an exception

The exception we are looking for, and the answer to OP, it literally the next line in the book, which is the end of s.43

"For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word 'meaning' it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer."

>And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer

It would be helpful but there is a lot to gain from PI even without understanding the context it was made.

Witty will guide you. He will start off showing you what an essentialist perspective of language is like and leads to, and then will oppose it.

It is more important for you to grasp that then the tractatus since the tractatus is just one example of essentialism.

"For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word 'meaning' it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer."

>And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer

How did Wittgenstein's remark change anythang

The "meaning" of "name" is "something that designates".
The meaning of a name is the object designated by it. How is that different than:
>the meaning of a word is its use in the language
Does the object in itself have no meaning?

why did you greentext that? that's a perfectly ordinary view, Wittgenstein just thinks that the name-object model shouldn't be taken to apply to all words -- although it certainly applies in some cases

not all words are names
not sure what you're on about with objects, this is a point about language

>not all words are names
What is an example of a word that is not a name?
>this is a point about language
I'm sorry. I was imagining language as something more complex than just semantics.

Architecture was kind of a big deal historically.

Hard for us to grasp that now, but Kings really wanted to be fancy you know?

Think paradaisia (probably spelt that wrong, I'm talking about that badass Persian city from which our word for paradise is derived).

I would not be surprised if people had deep things to say about design in the past.

>What is an example of a word that is not a name?
if
is
not
since
because
therefore
in
the
a
and
etc.

Any part of speech that is not a noun? Are verbs and adjectives names? Adverbs?

That playing victim is part of recovery is an interesting thought. Sounds similar to the idea behind stages of grief.

As for communicating without standard language? We tried that for a couple thousand years. Very soon after we stopped doing that we got to where we are today.

Yes, obviously. No. No.

this post and replies have actually been very interesting to read. thank you Veeky Forums

Wittengstein was smart, but not that smart, and to be fair his ouvre is somewhat underwhelming.
I have the strong doubt that he was that famous in the first part of the XX century only because his billionaire relatives were shilling him, and somehow everyone bought the idea of Wittengstein being an absolute, complete genius, even though he never gave any proof of it. It does not surprise me that he was very aware of this fact.

Yeah you definitely hit the nail on the head there Anonymous

Summed up well.

How exactly is cognitive science garbage? It seems ignorant to ignore one-half of the mind debate and only focus on the philosophical side.

Those are the two main perspectives being discussed here. There is the view that names just mean utterances associated with certain things and thats all there is to it, and that names just mean their use.

You then extend it past names and try to understand all words. That's what's roughly going on here

It is different like this: What is the meaning of the word "game"?

Imagine Socrates asking this question. People would give him examples of games and he would say no no, I did not ask for examples, I asked for a definition.

This is different from Wittgenstein, who will say that there is no one defintion, or form, or essence, for "game". There are examples, those examples resemble one another, and this is because they have different uses. There is a language-game for the word "game"

These two views oppose each other.


>Does the object in itself have no meaning?
You would have to clarify what you mean here. Try to distinguish between the word and the object when asking a question about meaning.

>why did you greentext that?

Because that is the answer to OP's question. I wanted to highlight that for them

>that's a perfectly ordinary view
I don't know what you are bringing this up

>What is an example of a word that is not a name?
A verb. You should read PI, this is where it starts so you might like it

a verb still names an action though, and that would be considered different than the meaning of that action.

Yes, but it also does other things doesnt it? Just like names.

If I say to you "slab", what does it mean to you? Does it mean one and only one thing or can it mean more than one? Am I giving you a command? Am I commanding you to grab a slab, to just imagine a slab?

If ordinary names have problems like these with their naming relation, it becomes even more apparent with other forms of language like verbs. Words are not just names, they serve other functions. Not even names are just simply names, they can serve other functions, and this becomes apparent when we focus on the use of the language rather than essences of language.

utterance associates with action x (naming)
utterance also "means" the action (?)

What is this second part. What are you trying to say? Are you trying to bring this back to Frege's Sense and Nominatum?