:rofl: with the sole purpose of causing mental mayhem for people like me — TheMadFool
"Give"us"an" "example" "of" "a" "word" "being" "used" "without" "a" "referent".
— StreetlightX
To be fair, "example", "word", "used" and "referent" also want scratching, here. — bongo fury
even if [reference] were the main game we might well choose to make it not the main game... — Banno
to retreat and regroup, or even to give up in the medium term and ask different questions, — bongo fury
To be even fairer, scratch "give", too. Admittedly, how (if) relation-words like verbs refer is where things get tricky, and mixed up in how (if) sentences refer, or correspond or picture or what have you. — bongo fury
None of those words - the ones you pointed out - have referents either though. — StreetlightX
Logic is just grammar. Linguists describe grammar, they don't proscribe it.
Logicians proscribe. — Banno
Are you sure you are not just going to great lengths to defend a theory we could do without?
'cause that's what I would say. — Banno
However, that words can carry different meanings depending on how we use it doesn't imply that referents don't exist, does it? — TheMadFool
I see that you then got (and seemed all too willing to get) sidetracked, into questions of definition, or fixity or primacy or essence. — bongo fury
That family resemblance exists in the word universe doesn't imply that words have no referents, that referential meaning is flawed and so forth. What it really does is reveal errors in word usage and the cumulative effect of such errors. — TheMadFool
I think Wittgenstein's argument is not that words have no referents but that our understanding is not a function of their references.
The problem is not that words are misused but that words don't have essential meanings.. — jacksonsprat22
Which is another way of saying meaning (of words) is not in reference but elsewhere and that elsewhere for Wittgenstein is use but, my suspicion is that words are being misused and since Wittgenstein's theory (of language games) is predicated on words being used well, it follows that his theory needs some adjustment to say the least. — TheMadFool
If you say something and I understand it then you have used words properly. — jacksonsprat22
My predilections and prejudices pull me overwhelmingly towards coherence as a foundation to language. So I bristle at anything that might even slightly undermine that. Even though Pussycat isn't suggesting the acceptability of incoherence, I'm proceeding with exuberant caution......the logic that people used in various historical periods... — Pussycat
Prior to Philosophical Investigations the ideal way to give the meaning of something had been thought to be by specifying both genus and differentia. So a 'triangle' is defined as 'a plane figure (genus) bounded by three straight sides (differentia)'.
Logically, this sort of definition can be seen as a series of conjunctions; A triangle is a plane figure and has three sides.
More generally, "P" might be defined using a simple conjunction of "A" and "B":
P =def A & B
By examining closely the use of terms such as 'game', 'number' and 'family', Wittgenstein showed that for a large number of terms such a definition is not possible. Rather, in some cases a definition needs to be a disjunction of conjuncts,
P =def (A & B) OR (C & D)
but furthermore the way we use such terms means that we can both extend and detract from the series by adding or removing some of the conjunctions.
P =def (A & B) OR (C & D) OR...
Nor should we conclude that because we cannot give a definition of "game" or "number" that we do not know what they are: "But this is not ignorance. We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn".[6]
It's the last step, that a definition is extensible, that TheMadFool was missing in his now-defunct thread. — Banno
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