What does this mean for Wittgenstein's much beloved theory of language games? — TheMadFool

words definitely do possess an essence — TheMadFool

The original Wiki article I wrote. — Banno

It means Wittgenstein is correct that words mean things in a context. Which is why we string them together in different ways. Expecting to isolate a word and some how extract every possible way it could exist in a context is an irrational activity. Was some one doing this at some point? — Cheshire

...rubbish. — Banno

Can you have a look at my reply to Cheshire. Much obliged. — TheMadFool

↪Banno :clap: :up: — 180 Proof

↪Cheshire doesn't seem to be even on the same cricket pitch, let alone playing the same game — Banno

Have you ever considered actually reading Wittgenstein instead of creating innumerable treads on him based on your quarter baked wiki-gleaned understanding of him?

The reduction of 'family resemblance' down to a series of propositional clauses is so far away from what Witty had in mind the only thing to say about the OP is that, as with every thread you've made on Witty, you've simply made shit up and pretended like what you've said has anything at all to do with him. — StreetlightX

Cheshire is saying exactly what you're saying - language games are real and so is family resemblance. — TheMadFool

No, he isn't. "Context"? FFS. — Banno

However, as I explained, this isn't so. Family resemblance is an artifact of bad philosophy, the precise error being committed being loose terminology as becomes possible when logical elements of definitions are overlooked, glossed over. The logical boo-boo people make is substituing AND with OR. Once we understand as we have here that family resemblance is simply misuse of words, a cardinal sin in philosophy, we can rest easy. After all, in the simplest sense, why found a philosophy on a mistake? — TheMadFool

It is here that Wittgenstein’s rejection of general explanations, and definitions based on sufficient and necessary conditions, is best pronounced. Instead of these symptoms of the philosopher’s “craving for generality”, he points to ‘family resemblance’ as the more suitable analogy for the means of connecting particular uses of the same word. There is no reason to look, as we have done traditionally—and dogmatically—for one, essential core in which the meaning of a word is located and which is, therefore, common to all uses of that word. We should, instead, travel with the word’s uses through “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (PI 66). Family resemblance also serves to exhibit the lack of boundaries and the distance from exactness that characterize different uses of the same concept. Such boundaries and exactness are the definitive traits of form—be it Platonic form, Aristotelian form, or the general form of a proposition adumbrated in the Tractatus. It is from such forms that applications of concepts can be deduced, but this is precisely what Wittgenstein now eschews in favor of appeal to similarity of a kind with family resemblance.

↪Cheshire doesn't seem to be even on the same cricket pitch, let alone playing the same game. — Banno

No, he isn't. "Context"? FFS. — Banno

You see the problem, right? — TheMadFool

You haven't changed a bit! — TheMadFool

But he hasn't noticed the open ended nature of family resemblance; that a given CNF will not be able to account for additions to the family. — Banno

Perhaps we've given up too early on the Socratic method. — Cuthbert

No, he isn't. "Context"? FFS. — Banno

So we've both hit upon the same idea (AND replaced by OR in definitions), I'm honored, but you remain unconvinced that this violation of definitional criteria is the real culprit that causes words to be used in such a fashion that no common thread (essence) is found to run through all the ways in a particular word is used. — TheMadFool

Excuse the tone. I'm a bit pissed at the "Wittgenstein is wrong 'cause I haven't read him" posts. — Banno

Socratic method — Cuthbert

In explaining a concept one approach is to look for necessary and sufficient conditions of its application. — Cuthbert

vagueness — Cuthbert

It's a common misunderstanding that Witty is an advocate for 'vagueness' or somesuch. Rather, he reckons that we continually or often look for 'exactitude' in the wrong place. My favoute example he gives is of someone saying 'wait for me roughly there'. And then he has some hypothetical idiot trying to specify exactly where 'there' is: its boundary, how far 'roughly' should extend from the point that is specified and so on. But of course, the non-idiot will know very well that when someone says 'wait for me roughly there', the idea is that one waits where they can be found again without too much hassle. The idiot here is the philosopher (or a particular kind of philosopher, I'd rather say). As Witty puts it, there's nothing vague about it. It's only when we have a false idea of 'the exact' that his take on language seems to brook the 'vague'.

PI §87: "The signpost is in order a if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose"; §88. "If I tell someone “Stay roughly here” - may this explanation not work perfectly?"; §98: "On the one hand, it is clear that every sentence in our language ‘is in order as it is’. That is to say, we are not striving after an ideal, as if our ordinary vague sentences had not yet got a quite unexceptionable sense, and a perfect language still had to be constructed by us. - On the other hand, it seems clear that where there is sense, there must be perfect order. —– So there must be perfect order even in the vaguest sentence".

There's a mathematical analogy to be drawn here. The idea is that language does not function as a well-ordered set. Every use of language is a matter of partial ordering: §97: "We are under the illusion that what is peculiar, profound and essential to us in our investigation resides in its trying to grasp the incomparable essence of language. That is, the order existing between the concepts of proposition, word, inference, truth, experience, and so forth. This order is a super-order between - so to speak - super-concepts". But concepts and words are singular. they respond to, and arise from, particular lived situations. And words and meanings cannot be mapped onto some trans-historical order that could be clarified once and for all. In every case it must be asked: does that word fulfil its purpose? And if so, it's exact as it can be. — StreetlightX

You see the problem, right? — TheMadFool

Where Cheshire and you concur and what I have an issue with is that both of you rely on the notion of context albeit not in the same sense. Needless to say Cheshire is referring to context as it applies to family resemblance as described above. About this, I've already made my thoughts as clear as I could in the preceding paragraphs. — TheMadFool

I'm sympathetic to Wittgenstein's idea that philosophy may be hostage to language i.e. some features of language may generate what Wittgenstein calls pseudo-problems - issues that seem to be philosophical but are in fact like the dents/small depressions around nail heads in wood, more about the tool, the hammer (here language) than about nails or wood (here philosophy) — TheMadFool

You are accusing him of putting a foot on the scale of (not)essence by using an unrealistic standard for maintaining it and yet acknowledging a more open standard in a tangential matter? Words don't have an essence; they have community usage and agreed upon translations. As well as their particular appearance in a game. Which I maintain is a clumsy word for context until either clearly refuted or I begin to make sense of this black book I purchased in misplaced optimism that I understood the English language; many years ago. — Cheshire