How are the various uses you mention above divorced from the sign-referent sense of meaning? — TheMadFool
Define: "the sign-referent sense of meaning". — Olivier5
How did you come to disagree with me without having understood me? — TheMadFool
In his discussion of the beetle and in imagining a private language (and a boiling pot), we take Witt to be intent on destroying the referent/the object/the thing-in-itself/the essence/our experience. — Antony Nickles
This is the picture solipsism has of itself. It comes from the desire to remain unknowable, to have and keep something fundamentally special about me. — Antony Nickles
But "clearing up the ground" implies readying it for another project: — Antony Nickles
Notice the "if" in his quote at the top. If the grammar of the expression of sensation is not construed on the model of 'object and designation', than we are not irrelevant. — Antony Nickles
And what is done with language is un-theorizable in advance. — StreetlightX
Just because one can illustrate a concept via a picture or a painting doesn't imply that the nature of concepts is to be found in images. Vice versa, just because the meaning of words is elusive and cannot be fully captured by a definition doesn't imply that it's inexistant. In the silence of the mind, we know what words mean to us. — Olivier5
Sorry but I did not disagree with anything, was just answering your question about alternative use of words. But I can try again, with more disagreement. :-) — Olivier5
Meaning is use doesn't stand up to closer examinatio — TheMadFool
The beetle in the box: The word is same - "beetle" - but what it refers to maybe different. Wittgenstein's aim is not to come up with a solution, it seems impossible, but to do an exposé of the problem. — TheMadFool
So, explain your answer then please. — TheMadFool
Or showing that [an internal referent of sensation] can't serve the explanatory purpose that folks think it does, showing that it's parasitic on the same synchronization of public behavior which it is supposed to explain. — hanaH
but isn't [the picture of a referent] also about an obsession with certainty? "I can't be wrong about seeing this patch of redness. That at least is something I can count on." — hanaH
"Sensation" or "appearance" is the name of something one cannot be wrong about. Or so runs the grammar, which is mistaken for a deep, metaphysical principle, as if we don't just happen to usually use the words that way. — hanaH
But "clearing up the ground" implies readying it for another project:
— Antony Nickles
One project could be a better linguistics. Another project might be more personal, to talk less confused nonsense, to pay more attention to worthier issues. — hanaH
Only here I'm trying to show that the point is not to replace the internal referent with an external one, as if the problem was just the assumption of an internal thing, and not that the grammar of sensations is entirely different even than public behavior. — Antony Nickles
Yes, but to say we "don't just happen to usually use the words that way" is to simply flip to the other side of the same (generalized) coin, instead of seeing that sensations have their own logic that is entirely different, rather than simply the negation of the internal referent. — Antony Nickles
[Witt is saying] people use words correctly despite not being able to define them. — TheMadFool
[Meaning is use] just means there's no eternal dictionary somewhere. It's really not complicated or controversial.
"That [we can understand 15,000-year-old sentence is] because all of the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the four sentences are words that have descended largely unchanged from a language that died out as the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. Those few words mean the same thing, and sound almost the same, as they did then." — frank
The picture of a word-referent clouds our ability to see that language works differently in each case (concept) — Antony Nickles
Here, we are generalizing the case that a word can be defined (fulfilling our desire for a fixed meaning). — Antony Nickles
To be clear, him saying "The meaning of a word is its use in language" is to say that concepts have various possibilities (including being extended) depending on the context, as in options — Antony Nickles
the grammar of sensations is public behavior though. Toothaches and stopsigns both get their "meaning" (if we insist on taking such a concept seriously) from what happens outside us, in between us. — hanaH
To be clear, I'm emphasizing that we inherit our participation in the communication system, are trained into it. — hanaH
I enjoy the conversation. — hanaH
If language really worked differently in each case, language would be useless. — frank
Here, we are generalizing the case that a word can be defined (fulfilling our desire for a fixed meaning).
— Antony Nickles
Misguided psychoanalysis. Living languages continuously evolve due to random, exuberant creativity. — frank
To be clear, him saying "The meaning of a word is its use in language" is to say that concepts have various possibilities (including being extended) depending on the context, as in options
— Antony Nickles
I don't think so. He just meant language users are embedded in a world. Pulling language out of that worldly setting won't help us understand ourselves, or our speech and thought. — frank
except that you follow that with the assumption that I mean to be "pulling language out of that worldly setting" — Antony Nickles
Also certain greetings famously have no reference, like "Helo". — Olivier5
Coming back to picturing words... That's how writing was invented originally. — Olivier5
And so stop signs and toothaches do not "get their 'meaning' " in the same way, much less necessarily "from what happens outside us". — Antony Nickles
Toothaches" and "God" and "justice" and "truth" are, in my view, tokens, just like the cries of the vervet monkey, albeit caught up in a far more complicated system. It might be helpful here to think of individual social organisms as relatively closed systems that signal one another "materially" (as opposed to a telepathy of rarefied concept-stuff.) As I see it, the point is synchronized behavior. So looking inside a single organism for meaning seems misguided, though one might naturally inquire how the sign system is "stored" as it is learned, etc. — hanaH
What about the idea that my talking and thinking and sensing to myself is already a form of sociality that submits my sensations and thoughts to contextual
alteration? — Joshs
Derrida talks about this stuff. Writing has tend to be cast as a dead thing, as opposed to speech which is living. But, as you mention, speech is not so pure in relation to writing. In both cases we have repeatable tokens. In our different handwriting we can write the "same" letter or word. — hanaH
And as soon as we repeat a meaning we subject it to contextual alteration, which destroys the purity of its intended sense. — Joshs
Not the solipsism of a closed system but a continuous exposure to and being affected by an outside. — Joshs
Yes, we can talk and act when we are alone in ways that end up changing the way we talk and act around others. But unwitnessed actions (including speech acts) don't seem unlikely to change signaling conventions/habits directly — hanaH
I agree that we alter context as we speak. Is the intended sense ever fully present? This is the heart of Derrida for me — hanaH
But do not these group habits and conventions themselves originate as person, context and perspective based? — Joshs
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