Ah, but did Witty have daddy issues? Can't read the PI without knowing that either.

As with your initial confusion about 'games', they were irrelevant then, and they remain irrelevant now. — StreetlightX

Repeat as required. But that's a repetition. Twice within a short section of the book I've fallen into a very similar misunderstanding. It's most likely not irrelevant. And, my interpretations of "game", as well as "grammar", which have proven to be inconsistent with Wittgenstein's use, are in each case according to the primary definitions of those terms in the OED. So, I believe I am observing the beginning of a pattern of idiosyncratic use. As a pattern, if it exists, it cannot be irrelevant.

Of course it's idiosyncratic. This is philosophy. The OED is for children who are too inexperienced to pay attention to context.

And so, it's relevant.

Ah, but did Witty have daddy issues? Can't read the PI without knowing that either. — StreetlightX

Why else would it be that "I and the father are one"? You have to submit to everything both your parents have ever been right about. Honour thy mother and father.

Excuse the interjection, but @Ciaran, I think you've made your point. The back and forth beyond that has been deleted. Hope you can all get back to focusing on the text now.

§50 (Part 1)

§50 continues its engagements with the Theaetetus passage, this time, turning its attention to the question of existence (or ‘being’). Before going on it’s worth quickly noting just how much Witty has so far excavated from this passage: first, in §47 and §48, the relation between simples and composites; next, in §49, the role that both have with respect to explanation, description, and naming. Now, in §50, the question of the meaning of ‘existence’ with respect to simples and composites. All these terms and the relations between them - explanation, description, naming, existence, simples and composites - can all be found in the Theaetetus passage, and its actually pretty cool to see how much Witty manages to wring out of it in his own efforts to establish an alternative articulation between them.

Anyway, §50 pulls all these threads together and is, as a result, probably one of the more confusing if not brilliant passages in all of the PI. In it, Witty fleshes out the notion - one I mentioned earlier - that language-games are the condition of sense, this time, by paying close attention to the sense (and thus grammar) of ‘existence’. For existence too has a sense, and its sense is similarly conditioned by the use to which it is put. Hence the first part of §50, which begins by setting out a conditional (an ‘if’), which lays out a use of ‘being’ and ‘non-being’, and follows its consequences:

§50: “If everything that we call “being” and “non-being” consists in the obtaining and non-obtaining of connections between elements, [then] it makes no sense to speak of the being (non-being) of an element” (emphasis and ‘then’ added).

With what follows being simply the counterpart of this conditional (I’ll re-arrange the sentence to make it more obvious):

§50: “If everything that we call “destruction” lies in the separation of elements … [then] it makes no sense to speak of the destruction of an element” (emphasis and ‘then’ added).

As with the grammatical relativisation of the simple and the complex in §47 and §48, here too the sense of ‘existence’ is made relative to grammar, or, what amounts to the same thing, our use of words in a language-game. The conditional serves to highlight that "everything that we call “being” and “non-being” may well be otherwise; that is, contingent upon other grammars or uses of words. The second part of §50 brings the question of names back into the fold, and deals with one of my favourite bits in the PI, about the meter rule in Paris. It gets its own post.

The main point of of 50 is not simply to declare that this inability to attribute existence to simples is a rule within the language game, Wittgenstein is not writing a linguistics textbook, it is to set up the way in which question such as "what is blue?" are meaningless. One can only ask "what is blue?" (a question still asked) because of a confusion about the ostensive declaration that a thing is blue. The purpose is to show a way out of pointless philosophical questions, not to describe the way language functions.

I have to agree with Ciaran here. Sorry. This is also how my professor taught the PI, and it makes more sense given the overall message of the book.

We'll get there in good time, my little beavers.

Okay. We were just jumping ahead.

Just to be clear - the PI for me is... well put it this way, it's one of two books I've ever annotated from start to finish, so yeah, I kinda know that you're jumping ahead. Water's wet, you'll tell me next?

My approach here is to simply read it as if for the first time, taking each passage as it comes, and reading it organically. These groups are best suited to first time readers, so that's the assumption I'm operating under. If I'm not dealing with things that are dealt with far later in the text, then yes, that's almost exactly the point (did I need to explain this? To which idiot?). If and when I do refer to later sections, it's something I try to signpost pretty heavily

Feel free to do otherwise if you'd like. But my plan is to stick to the same parameters of reading that I've followed so far. Which includes dealing with replies, objections, or other derivitive discussions.

You might almost say that your running commentary is a measuring stick by means of which our discussion and assessment of the Philosophical Investigations gains a normative valence, and without this sort of measuring stick functioning as the background against which we engage in a common conversation the language-game of this group will spin off into the void and become meaningless.

If only there were some sort of aphorism where Wittgenstein lays out this line of thought. Of course, if there were, you should probably treat that section of the aphorism separately from the other part, because it seems like it would be important.

My approach here is to simply read it as if for the first time, taking each passage as it comes, and reading it organically. These groups are best suited to first time readers, so that's the assumption I'm operating under. If I'm not dealing with things that are dealt with far later in the text, then yes, that's almost exactly the point (did I need to explain this? To which idiot?). — StreetlightX

It's not, for me, that these issues aren't dealt with until later though. They arise directly from questions I think many people have with the text as it reads. My first question on my first ever reading of PI was indeed "why the hell is he knocking down some half-baked idea of language from 600 years ago?". To a good third of the subsequent arguments it was "yeah, but who thinks that anyway?" I think they're important questions to explore as the text is read. I don't want to treat it like a suspense thriller where we don't want to spoil the big plot twist at the end where Wittgenstein murders metaphysics.

You know you're allowed to create your own threads, right?

Or posts even! In this thread! About the book! :gasp:

:snicker:

You know you're allowed to create your own threads, right? — John Doe

Yeah, but I don't understand the relevance. Are you suggesting that commenting on the meaning of section 50 of Philosophical Investigations is not on-topic in a thread about reading Philosophical Investigations which has arrived at section 50?

(did I need to explain this? To which idiot?). — StreetlightX

My bad. Proceed, good sir.

I'm going back to §49because of its relevance to another thread I'm working on - Kripke.

In that thread there is much discussion of the relation between naming and descriptions. But here Wittgenstein says

For naming and describing do not stand on the same level; naming is a preparation for description. Naming is so far not a move int he language-game - any more than putting a piece on the board is a move in chess.

In one way this seems to me to presage the assassination of definite descriptions in Naming and Necessity.

On the other hand, putting the pieces on the board in the right place, while not the competition, is part of the game of chess...

...and compare that to the discussion of the metre rule in Paris (§50).

I want to say that the Standard Metre is one metre long; it has a length, so one must be able to say how long it is...

To measure the length of anything else, I hold it up to the standard metre. This is the game of "measuring". But I can't hold the Standard Meter against itself...

Or can I? Why not?

In the latter part of 50 Wittgenstein discusses "the means of representation". The metre stick represents "metre". The colour samples represent the different words used for colours. This is a continuation of what Streetlight says above, of the earlier part of 50, "the sense of 'existence' is made relative to grammar". It's similar to Plato's cave allegory in which sensible existence is made relative to ideas, that's what the philosopher sees which the cave dwellers do not. But here it's not ideas which sensible existence is a representation of (as is the case in Platonic idealism), it's words.

He has been building up this platform with his discussion of ostensive definition. In such demonstrations, the objects pointed to are used to represent the meaning, or use, of the words. Now we can remove the pointing of ostensive definition, and the very existence of the object is a "method of representation".

One might ask of Wittgenstein, if someone could, why is an object a "means" of representation, or "method" of representation, and not simply a representation, as is the case in Platonic idealism.

So is the standard Meter a duck-rabbit?

Maybe? A meter is a meter seems to be "in a queer sense" both a necessary and contingent truth, which hurts my puny human brain when I think about it for too long.

Here's what Baker & Hacker - always a good source when you're looking for the most extreme-bordering-on-parody reading of a given passage - have to say:

If ‘One metre is the length of the Metre Bar’ is not a contingent truth, is it then a necessary truth? Is it a necessary truth that the chess king moves one square at a time? [...] The question needlessly multiplies confusion at this stage. The better question to ask is: What is the role of this sentence? What do we use it for? What is its function in the language-game with metric measurement? The role of this sentence is not to describe how things are, but to present a norm of representation.

But surely, one might object, we can say that it is true that the length of the Standard Metre Bar is one metre? And if it is true, then is it not a statement of fact? We can indeed say that it is true. But the truth-operator is notoriously polygamous, and the moot question is what the truth-ascription amounts to. We can say that it is true that the king in chess moves one square at a time, but that does not make the assertion that the chess king moves one square at a time any the less a statement of a rule of chess. In both cases, all the truth-operation does is to reaffirm a rule. — Baker & Hacker

Like a lot of dubious Wittgenstein readers, I think that they arrive at the interesting question (What does this sort of truth-ascription amount to?) then duck it by claiming it is simply a 'moot' question for a 'confused' reader then proceed along unbothered by a question that - it feels to me - ought to at least puzzle us.

Kripke had no problem with contingent necessities. A metre is a rigid designator, as I understand him, and hence the same in all possible worlds. It's the name of a length, not the name of a stick. SO it remains possible that the stick might not have been a metre long.

...the 'defnition', properly interpreted, does not say that the
phrase 'one meter' is to be synonymous... with the phrase 'the length of S at
to', but rather that we have determined the reference of the phrase
'one meter' by stipulating that 'one meter' is to be a rigid
designator of the length which is in fact the length of S at (a given time)

If we're quoting experts, then I like Stephen Mulhall's take in his book 'Wittgenstein's Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, Sections 243-315':

When Wittgenstein suggests (in §50) that the standard metre is the one thing of which we can say neither that it is, nor that it is not, one metre long, he characterizes that as marking its peculiar role in the language-game of measuring with a metre-rule. For if we were to try to represent its length as being one metre, and someone were to ask us what we meant by 'one metre', we could only point to the bar itself - thereby implying that what we had claimed amounted only to the empty 'assertion' that 'this bar is as long as it is'.

In other words, Wittgenstein's suggestion reflects the fact that the standard metre is an instrument of that dimension of our language of measurement; in the system of metric measurement, it is a means of representation rather than something that is represented. Hence, in so far as one can intelligibly remark that 'the standard metre is one metre long', that remark will function as an explanation of what we mean by 'one metre' (or perhaps as an explanation of what we mean by 'standard metre'); it will, in other words clarify the meaning of a word rather than conveying any information about the length of that particular rod or bar.

Or, as Robert J. Fogelin succinctly puts it in his 'Taking WIttgenstein at His Word: A Textual Study', in reference to the sepia example at §50:

What doesn't make sense is to use something as a standard and simultaneously judge its accordance with that standard.

:up:

they arrive at the interesting question (What does this sort of truth-ascription amount to?) then duck it by claiming it is simply a 'moot' question for a 'confused' reader then proceed along unbothered by a question that - it feels to me - ought to at least puzzle us. — John Doe

This is the point of the whole book. We did not ought to waste our time puzzling over it because the entire question only arises as an artifact of our language.

We can 'say' the Standard Metre is a Metre long if we want to, and in some contexts everyone will understand us. If everyone understands us, then the expression has done its job. Looking for what it is that we can 'really' say is exactly what Wittgenstein is trying to get us to stop doing.

Wittgenstein is simply using the actual Standard Metre as a way of showing how such confusions arise, not making normative claims about what we can and can't say.

Consider Paris is struck by some unprecedented and bizarre natural event and someone asks you to go and check if the Standard Metre is still a metre long, do you reply that you are unable to carry out such a request? Do you look at him in bafflement because what he has just said is meaningless? No, you take your tape measure (calibrated before the event) and measure the Standard Metre. If it is less then or more than the 1m mark on your tape measure you presume that something is wrong, not because you 'know' this as a true fact (you now can't possibly check if your tape measure is calibrated properly) but because it is sufficient for the current form of life that 1m is the length your tape measure says it is.

The point is to recognise that all talk about the truth value of the length of the Standard Metre is pointless.