Philosophical Investigations Part II - Wittgenstein

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Wyman
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Philosophical Investigations Part II - Wittgenstein

Post by Wyman »

I wanted to go through Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations Part II and make comments and invite comments.
This is jargon-free, so there will be no talk of _____ists or _______ism or any other philosophical mumbo jumbo.

The context is explaining and critiquing the concept of 'meaning' in language. For various reasons, this ties in to talk about mental states such as belief, knowledge, desire, fear, etc.. I mention this because so many on this site are interested in theories of consciousness (which arguably encompass such 'states') and not necessarily interested in philosophy of language. Hopefully, the connection will be sufficient to interest some of you in the discussion (or I will just talk to myself).
One can imagine an animal angry, frightened, unhappy, happy,
startled. But hopeful? And why not?

A dog believes his master is at the door. But can he also believe his
master will come the day after to-morrow?—And what can he not do
here?—How do I do it?—How am I supposed to answer this?

Can only those hope who can talk? Only those who have mastered
the use of a language. That is to say, the phenomena of hope are modes
of this complicated form of life. (If a concept refers to a character of
human handwriting, it has no application to beings that do not write.)

"Grief" describes a pattern which recurs, with different variations,
in the weave of our life. If a man's bodily expression of sorrow and
of joy alternated, say with the ticking of a clock, here we should not
have the characteristic formation of the pattern of sorrow or of the
pattern of joy.

"For a second he felt violent pain."—Why does it sound queer
to say: "For a second he felt deep grief"? Only because it so seldom
happens?

But don't you feel grief now? ("But aren't you playing chess now?")
The answer may be affirmative, but that does not make the concept
of grief any more like the concept of a sensation.—The question
was really, of course, a temporal and personal one, not the logical
question which we wanted to raise.

"I must tell you: I am frightened."
"I must tell you: it makes me shiver."—
And one can say this in a smiling tone of voice too.

And do you mean to tell me he doesn't feel it? How else does he
know it?—But even when he says it as a piece of information he does
not learn it from his sensations.

For think of the sensations produced by physically shuddering:
the words "it makes me shiver" are themselves such a shuddering reaction;
and if I hear and feel them as I utter them, this belongs among
the rest of those sensations. Now why should the wordless shudder
be the ground of the verbal one?
If I say 'I believe that it will rain tomorrow' - what is the object of my belief? If beliefs are like sensations, then it will be just like saying 'I see
a tree over there.' The object of my sight is a tree. The object of my belief is a proposition or thought - or belief.

When I say 'Azure means the same thing as light blue' I have in mind one color which is designated by both phrases. The meaning of the words are objects unto themselves - whether thoughts, or concepts or images. They are the things referred to by the words; but they are not physical objects - or physical objects are just a special case of meaning called 'naming.' Thus, all words have meanings; words which name physical objects have those objects as their meaning.

The above two paragraphs are examples of some explanations of meaning and belief which Wittgenstein is calling into question. Modeling beliefs and other mental states on perception breaks down at many points. Modeling meaning on naming also breaks down.

When we believe that 'p', or hope that 'p' or know that 'p' we are part of a relationship between ourselves and a proposition (sentence; and its parts- words). Dogs and other beings who have no language can have no relationship with propositions because propositions are wholly linguistic.
Impenitent
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Re: Philosophical Investigations Part II - Wittgenstein

Post by Impenitent »

the window was so afraid that it shuttered...

private meaning is not necessarily absurd...

why should private language be impossible?

lack of spoken language does not necessarily negate the understanding of it...

-Imp
uwot
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Re: Philosophical Investigations Part II - Wittgenstein

Post by uwot »

Wyman, I salute you. This thread is a triumph of optimism over experience. Language isn't a great interest of mine, to be honest. I've paid my logical dues; a long time ago to be fair, but what struck me then was that the more I analysed language, the less I understood it. I made my mind up that language is any means by which two or more people exchange meaning, usually imperfectly and often woefully. I think the inspiration was the conviction that Russell's logical atomism was a really bad idea, consequently language, words, are contextual. It is only a string of them, or logical 'atoms' that have any meaningful meaning.
Wyman
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Re: Philosophical Investigations Part II - Wittgenstein

Post by Wyman »

Impenitent wrote:the window was so afraid that it shuttered...

private meaning is not necessarily absurd...

why should private language be impossible?

lack of spoken language does not necessarily negate the understanding of it...

-Imp
But private meaning can only take place within the broader context of a learned language - if we suppose we know what a 'meaning' is, which is what is being explored here.

'lack of a spoken language' with understanding would imply that one is mute. That wouldn't really constitute a 'lack of a language.' Even dogs possess some language activity and understanding, just not higher forms. So I agree with you, but you snuck that word 'spoken' in there.

Private language would consist of visual images from imagination and memory I suppose. There would be no need to verbalize anything if it's not meant for communication, would there? Something like how primitive humans lived; which was a lot like dogs and other animals. If you're talking about a private language that someone makes up so as to talk to themselves - a fake language along the lines of Klingon or Pig-Latin - that is parasitic on one's previously learned native language, I think.
Impenitent
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Re: Philosophical Investigations Part II - Wittgenstein

Post by Impenitent »

Wyman wrote:But private meaning can only take place within the broader context of a learned language - if we suppose we know what a 'meaning' is, which is what is being explored here.
define pain as you understand it, now define pain as if you lost both your legs, now define pain as if you are someone who has given birth, now define pain as if you miscarried the child. you've not had these experiences? how then can you actually understand these meanings? ... communication is an approximation of meaning via definitional representation, but never exactly demonstrated ...

Wyman wrote:'lack of a spoken language' with understanding would imply that one is mute. That wouldn't really constitute a 'lack of a language.' Even dogs possess some language activity and understanding, just not higher forms. So I agree with you, but you snuck that word 'spoken' in there.
I was thinking those with autism... pecs...
Wyman wrote:Private language would consist of visual images from imagination and memory I suppose. There would be no need to verbalize anything if it's not meant for communication, would there? Something like how primitive humans lived; which was a lot like dogs and other animals. If you're talking about a private language that someone makes up so as to talk to themselves - a fake language along the lines of Klingon or Pig-Latin - that is parasitic on one's previously learned native language, I think.
not necessarily visual... interjections are not necessarily meant for communication, e.g. expressions of pain exclaimed with no audience... language is privately defined though private experience ... language as communicated is never exact

-Imp
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Re: Philosophical Investigations Part II - Wittgenstein

Post by Necromancer »

My take: Should we attempt some conclusions of the Philosophical Investigations?

1st: The descriptive tasks are complete with our current language. Sometimes we need new words and then we invent them in describing our "object" at hand.

2nd: The language will not yield discoveries on its own. It takes more than language to make discoveries.

3rd: The bridging of "Philosophical Investigations" from language to science and the other descriptive tasks like storytelling of character, morality etc., is evidently complete too.

Are we now at a point in history where we have advanced beyond "Philosophical Investigations", that nowadays "Philosophical Investigations" in terms of description has become the student's study as standard? There's no doubt that "Philosophical Investigations" is a great read. Enjoy!
Wyman
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Re: Philosophical Investigations Part II - Wittgenstein

Post by Wyman »

uwot wrote:Wyman, I salute you. This thread is a triumph of optimism over experience. Language isn't a great interest of mine, to be honest. I've paid my logical dues; a long time ago to be fair, but what struck me then was that the more I analysed language, the less I understood it. I made my mind up that language is any means by which two or more people exchange meaning, usually imperfectly and often woefully. I think the inspiration was the conviction that Russell's logical atomism was a really bad idea, consequently language, words, are contextual. It is only a string of them, or logical 'atoms' that have any meaningful meaning.
Well, it got Impenitent to respond, so optimism has triumphed.

If language is an exchange of meaning, is it an exchange of paper money or gold? Do we exchange a proxy for the real thing? Something to think about.
Wyman
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Re: Philosophical Investigations Part II - Wittgenstein

Post by Wyman »

define pain as you understand it, now define pain as if you lost both your legs, now define pain as if you are someone who has given birth, now define pain as if you miscarried the child. you've not had these experiences? how then can you actually understand these meanings? ... communication is an approximation of meaning via definitional representation, but never exactly demonstrated ...
Experience a, b and c (pain in legs, pain in childbirth, etc.) are all different. They are sensations, let us say. The same word is (sometimes) used to describe all three. But the word is used differently in all three contexts, depending on how adept you are at language - Shakespeare would use different sentences to describe each pain than I would. The word pain would be one tool in the description of a particular situation. The events a,b and c are not the meanings of the word; they belong to a set of experiences that, in a given context, one may group together for descriptive purposes.

In other words, you - in your model of language - want to have 'pain' denote something - an experience; just as your name denotes an individual. But you notice that 'pain' denotes an infinite number of possible experiences, all slightly different. So you qualify the pain - say it is 'strong' and 'piercing' - narrowing down the range of experiences that belong to the same set of experiences as the one you are trying to describe. Depending on how specific and descriptive you want to be (you talk differently to a doctor than to your wife than to a nosy bystander), you narrow down the description to denote a set of shared experiences sufficiently analogous or similar to the one you are describing as to adequately convey your 'meaning.' So in your model, 'pain' denotes a set of experiences - more vague or less vague as the situation demands - not a particular experience.

And so it can be translated into logic and set theory and it all seems very nice and neat - Tractatus-like, or Russell-like as uwot alluded to. But all that has been accomplished is to say that 'meaning' denotes a vague set of vague sets of experiences. This is not a satisfactory explanation and perhaps a different model of meaning is warranted.
Wyman
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Re: Philosophical Investigations Part II - Wittgenstein

Post by Wyman »

ii

In saying "When I heard this word, it meant . . . . to me" one
refers to a point of time and to a way of using the word. (Of course, it is
this combination that we fail to grasp.)
And the expression "I was then going to say . . . . ." refers to a
point of time and to an action.

I speak of the essential references of the utterance in order to distinguish
them from other peculiarities of the expression we use. The
references that are essential to an utterance are the ones which would
make us translate some otherwise alien form of expression into this,
our customary form.

If you were unable to say that the word "till" could be both a verb
and a conjunction, or to construct sentences, in which it was now the
one and now the other, you would not be able to manage simple
schoolroom exercises. But a schoolboy is not asked to conceive the
word in one way or another out of any context, or to report how he
has conceived it.

The words "the rose is red" are meaningless if the word "is" has the
meaning "is identical with".—Does this mean: if you say this sentence
and mean the "is" as the sign of identity, the sense disintegrates?
We take a sentence and tell someone the meaning of each of its
words; this tells him how to apply them and so how to apply the
sentence too. If we had chosen a senseless sequence of words instead
of the sentence, he would not learn how to apply the sequence. And if we
explain the word "is" as the sign of identity, then he does not learn
how to use the sentence "the rose is red".

And yet there is something right about this 'disintegration of the
sense'. You get it in the following example: one might tell someone:
if you want to pronounce the salutation "Hail!" expressively, you had
better not think of hailstones as you say it.

Experiencing a meaning and experiencing a mental image. "In
both cases", we should like to say, "we are experiencing something,
only something different. A different content is proffered—is present—
to consciousness."—What is the content of the experience of imagining?
The answer is a picture, or a description. And what is the content
of the experience of meaning? I don't know what I am supposed to
say to this.—If there is any sense in the above remark, it is that the
two concepts are related like those of 'red' and 'blue'; and that is wrong.

Can one keep hold of an understanding of meaning as one can keep
hold of a mental image? That is, if one meaning of a word suddenly
strikes me,—can it also stay there in my mind?

"The whole scheme presented itself to my mind in a flash and stayed
there like that for five minutes." Why does this sound odd? One
would like to think: what flashed on me and what stayed there in my
mind can't have been the same.

I exclaimed "Now I have it!"—a sudden start, and then I was able
to set the scheme forth in detail. What is supposed to have stayed
in this case? A picture, perhaps. But "Now I have it" did not mean,
I have the picture.

If a meaning of a word has occurred to you and you have not forgotten
it again, you can now use the word in such-and-such a way.

If the meaning has occurred to you, now you know it, and the knowing
began when it occurred to you. Then how is it like an experience
of imagining something?

If I say "Mr. Scot is not a Scot", I mean the first "Scot" as a proper
name, the second one as a common name. Then do different things
have to go on in my mind at the first and second "Scot"? (Assuming
that I am not uttering the sentence 'parrot-wise'.)—Try to mean the
first "Scot" as a common name and the second one as a proper name.—
How is it done? When / do it, I blink with the effort as I try to parade
the right meanings before my mind in saying the words.—But do I
parade the meanings of the words before my mind when I make the
ordinary use of them?

When I say the sentence with this exchange of meanings I feel that
its sense disintegrates.—Well, / feel it, but the person I am saying it to
does not. So what harm is done?——"But the point is, when one
utters the sentence in the usual way something else, quite definite,
takes place."—What takes place is not this 'parade of the meanings
before one's mind'.
Is complete nominalism defensible? The idea of a meaning attached to each word is the idea of a concept or universal. The idea of 'having' a meaning or 'understanding' a meaning signifies that there is some relation between a word and a concept or a human and a concept - that concepts are something that one 'has.' Hence they are things. And since they are invisible and have something to do with the human mind, they must be like images in the mind or like feelings or perceptions. The first section touched on the problem of identifying them as feelings and perceptions (mental states).

If a concept or a meaning is not a 'mental entity' like imaginings and not things we feel or perceive, what are they? He says the meaning is the use of the word, in part one of the book. But that phrasing is a bit awkward, since a 'use' is not a thing. But I agree that it seems closer to the truth.

When we 'get' a concept - in a flash - we do not acquire or come in to contact with a mental entity. We acquire a skill or ability. We can now use the concept from this point on (unless we forget it). Learning a concept is acquiring an ability for use in the activity of language.
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Re: Philosophical Investigations Part II - Wittgenstein

Post by HexHammer »

Wyman wrote:Dogs and other beings who have no language can have no relationship with propositions because propositions are wholly linguistic.
Completely moronic, dogs has language so his points falls apart.
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Re: Philosophical Investigations Part II - Wittgenstein

Post by Wyman »

HexHammer wrote:
Wyman wrote:Dogs and other beings who have no language can have no relationship with propositions because propositions are wholly linguistic.
Completely moronic, dogs has language so his points falls apart.
It depends on how you define language. Later in the post, I said that dogs have a kind of primitive language. Sitting when told to 'sit' and and wagging their tails when they're excited can be described as a type of language. But it can also be described as something very different. Just like ring a roses can be called a game at the same time that chess is called a game. They have very little, if anything in common.

Have you ever seen a dog string together more than one signal (tail wagging, bark, etc.) to form a complex signal? You, as a human, can believe that _____, you can know that _______. People have relations to(attitudes towards) sentences and use words in an infinite variety of ways - governed by rules of grammar - to create sentences on the spot to describe facts and things.
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Re: Philosophical Investigations Part II - Wittgenstein

Post by Impenitent »

Wyman wrote:
define pain as you understand it, now define pain as if you lost both your legs, now define pain as if you are someone who has given birth, now define pain as if you miscarried the child. you've not had these experiences? how then can you actually understand these meanings? ... communication is an approximation of meaning via definitional representation, but never exactly demonstrated ...
Experience a, b and c (pain in legs, pain in childbirth, etc.) are all different. They are sensations, let us say. The same word is (sometimes) used to describe all three. But the word is used differently in all three contexts, depending on how adept you are at language - Shakespeare would use different sentences to describe each pain than I would. The word pain would be one tool in the description of a particular situation. The events a,b and c are not the meanings of the word; they belong to a set of experiences that, in a given context, one may group together for descriptive purposes.

In other words, you - in your model of language - want to have 'pain' denote something - an experience; just as your name denotes an individual. But you notice that 'pain' denotes an infinite number of possible experiences, all slightly different. So you qualify the pain - say it is 'strong' and 'piercing' - narrowing down the range of experiences that belong to the same set of experiences as the one you are trying to describe. Depending on how specific and descriptive you want to be (you talk differently to a doctor than to your wife than to a nosy bystander), you narrow down the description to denote a set of shared experiences sufficiently analogous or similar to the one you are describing as to adequately convey your 'meaning.' So in your model, 'pain' denotes a set of experiences - more vague or less vague as the situation demands - not a particular experience.

And so it can be translated into logic and set theory and it all seems very nice and neat - Tractatus-like, or Russell-like as uwot alluded to. But all that has been accomplished is to say that 'meaning' denotes a vague set of vague sets of experiences. This is not a satisfactory explanation and perhaps a different model of meaning is warranted.
well early Wittgenstein says "all is language", later Wittgenstein says "no it isn't"

we are agreed that definitions are not exact enough... check out Saussure (then Derrida)

-Imp
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HexHammer
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Re: Philosophical Investigations Part II - Wittgenstein

Post by HexHammer »

Wyman wrote:
HexHammer wrote:
Wyman wrote:Dogs and other beings who have no language can have no relationship with propositions because propositions are wholly linguistic.
Completely moronic, dogs has language so his points falls apart.
It depends on how you define language. Later in the post, I said that dogs have a kind of primitive language. Sitting when told to 'sit' and and wagging their tails when they're excited can be described as a type of language. But it can also be described as something very different. Just like ring a roses can be called a game at the same time that chess is called a game. They have very little, if anything in common.

Have you ever seen a dog string together more than one signal (tail wagging, bark, etc.) to form a complex signal? You, as a human, can believe that _____, you can know that _______. People have relations to(attitudes towards) sentences and use words in an infinite variety of ways - governed by rules of grammar - to create sentences on the spot to describe facts and things.
Try read up on it, instead of being a professor on ignorant grounds.

Even insects has language.
Wyman
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Re: Philosophical Investigations Part II - Wittgenstein

Post by Wyman »

HexHammer wrote:
Wyman wrote:
It depends on how you define language. Later in the post, I said that dogs have a kind of primitive language. Sitting when told to 'sit' and and wagging their tails when they're excited can be described as a type of language. But it can also be described as something very different. Just like ring a roses can be called a game at the same time that chess is called a game. They have very little, if anything in common.

Have you ever seen a dog string together more than one signal (tail wagging, bark, etc.) to form a complex signal? You, as a human, can believe that _____, you can know that _______. People have relations to(attitudes towards) sentences and use words in an infinite variety of ways - governed by rules of grammar - to create sentences on the spot to describe facts and things.
Try read up on it, instead of being a professor on ignorant grounds.

Even insects has language.
How do you describe the difference between human language and the language of, say, bees doing their waggle dance? If you call what bees do 'language' then I'll give that word to you and I'll think of another one.
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HexHammer
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Re: Philosophical Investigations Part II - Wittgenstein

Post by HexHammer »

Wyman wrote:How do you describe the difference between human language and the language of, say, bees doing their waggle dance? If you call what bees do 'language' then I'll give that word to you and I'll think of another one.
Humans has greater brains, and therefore can communicate in a more complex way, because not only do we have greater memory, but also greater intellect.

Not only can bees tell other bees where a located flower is, but also it's geometical shape it's surrounded by. Bees can vote and therefore actually has a very complex form of communication.

Our everyday understanding of dogs is very limited, only if we observe the complex behaviour of the Russian subway dogs, they will display an amazingly intellect and behaviour. The big mussle dogs doesn't always get to be the leader of the gang, but the smartest, they understand how to cooperate and how to embark on a journey to a certain destination via subway trains.
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