I was replying to him. I don't know what that refers to. I said term which includes adverbs.

How can you parse the phrase "king of america" without a referent at all? I feel it's necessary to emphasize that the referent does not need to be material but if you don't know what a king is or what america is or what they are when conjoined (a linguistic conception, a monarch of america game simulator) then you can't meaningfully decide whether it's true or not. — Shwah

I've not argued words have no meaning. I've argued they need not point to anything to have that meaning. The word "the" means something, but there is no "the" in a material or non-material way.

Okay but there are times the king of america does exist and even times you are the king of america. There are certainly references which make that true such as choosing monarch in civilization as america.

was replying to him. I don't know what that refers to. I said term which includes adverbs. — Shwah

You've just argued that a referent must exist for there to be meaning. What does "intelligently" refer to?

I just said it has too general reference. It's like saying "this is objective fact" where we can't properly describe "objective" except as their subjective fact. So it's a reference to an existential construct (subjective fact).

Okay but there are times the king of america does exist and even times you are the king of america. There are certainly references which make that true such as choosing monarch in civilization as america. — Shwah

By America, I mean the USA, and the USA never had a king.

Okay so you have to refer to America and a king of a certain sort (in a monarch position of government etc etc). Them conjoined implies a reference. That you have to refer to things to specify what you mean implies the necessity of a reference (not a material reference).

So it's a reference to an existential construct (subjective fact). — Shwah

Saying its only referent is its subjective meaning is denying it has a referent.

The referent to "Donald Trump" is Donald Trump. See how you have a word, its meaning, and the actual referent? You're missing the actual referent with the term "King of America."

You need a reference for king. You've already said that. You also need one for America (again already said). How they are conjoined dictates another reference for instance the King (of Spain visited) America is completely different from King of America. So there's still a reference there or there is no way to meaningfully parse the statement "King of America".

How can you parse the phrase "king of america" without a referent at all? I feel it's necessary to emphasize that the referent does not need to be material but if you don't know what a king is or what america is or what they are when conjoined (a linguistic conception, a monarch of america game simulator) then you can't meaningfully decide whether it's true or not. — Shwah

Substance abuse, my friend. Make an appointment with Dr. Wittgenstein to begin your therapy. Grammar's grabbed you by the groin most grievously.

He would be saying what I would. You would find the reference in the language game but he very specifically speaks about everything having a reference.

So there's still a reference there or there is no way to meaningfully parse the statement "King of America". — Shwah

It'll sound like none scents but parsing is best understood in terms of bodies doing stuff effectively in the world. Sometimes the appropriate reaction is a shrug or a giggle. The taken-for-granted realm of spirits (meanings in minds) has been shown wanting.

He would be saying what I would. You would find the reference in the language game but he very specifically speaks about everything having a reference. — Shwah

I'm talking about his later work. Are you?

So atheism is logical as long as God is fictional ? Isn't that exactly what atheists say? — Hanover

Incorrect. Atheists say god does not exist. Which is different than saying god is fictional. I just said that about bigfoot and company.

This is a killer passage from the Blue Book. I guess you can call it a transitional work, but I find the gist of the moon called went gone slime hair.

Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning. Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not treat of dashes on a bit of paper. Frege's ideas could be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life. And the same, of course, could be said of any propositions: Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would be an utterly dead and trivial thing. And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live. And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs.

But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we have to say that it is its use.
If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method we just described of replacing this mental image by some outward object seen, e.g. a painted or modelled image. Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead? -- In fact, as soon as you think of replacing the mental image by, say, a painted one, and as soon as the image thereby loses its occult character, it ceased to seem to impart any life to the sentence at all. (It was in fact just the occult character of the mental process which you needed for your purposes.)

The mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign. (One of reasons for this mistake is again that we are looking for a "thing corresponding to a substantive.")

The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.

As a part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever accompanied it would for us just be another sign.

I think we can add that understanding a language is understanding a lifeworld or a form of life. Language is embedded in the world. The meaning of the stop sign is there in the way the cars move around it.

Incorrect. Atheists say god does not exist. Which is different than saying god is fictional. I just said that about bigfoot and company. — L'éléphant

An atheist would claim that God is a fictional character in the Bible. They wouldn't deny he existed as that fictional character. If they did, I think someone would just open the Bible and show them where he was being talked about.

The same holds for Tom Sawyer, Tiny Tim, and Harry Potter. They don't exist as anything other than fictional characters.

Language games? From philosophical investigations?

The meaning of the word depends on the language-game within which it is being used. Another way Wittgenstein puts the point is that the word "water" has no meaning apart from its use within a language-game. One might use the word as an order to have someone else bring you a glass of water. But it can also be used to warn someone that the water has been poisoned. One might even use the word as code by members of a secret society.

Wittgenstein does not limit the application of his concept of language games to word-meaning. He also applies it to sentence-meaning. For example, the sentence "Moses did not exist" (§79) can mean various things. Wittgenstein argues that independently of use the sentence does not yet 'say' anything. It is 'meaningless' in the sense of not being significant for a particular purpose. It only acquires significance if we fix it within some context of use. Thus, it fails to say anything because the sentence as such does not yet determine some particular use. The sentence is only meaningful when it is used to say something.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)

I literally said language games. Yes he's referring to the designated language is what is used to give meaning to a word so the meaning of the word refers to the language which it's a part of.

He makes no claim to word meanings being dependent upon reference. He's talking about words lacking meaning outside of usage or context. That is, "Moses did not exist" only obtains meaning within particularized contextualized use, being devoid of meaning just as a stark statement.

Nice quote. I'm surprised then that you'd still insist on some spectral referent.

One might use the word as an order to have someone else bring you a glass of water. But it can also be used to warn someone that the water has been poisoned. One might even use the word as code by members of a secret society.

In the first example, we are trying to get water into our body. In the second ,we are trying to keep poison or infection out of a friend's body. In the last, access to a space is being secured. The context-bound 'meaning' of the sentences is there in the relationships of the expressions of 'iterable' tokens (words) with other bodily movements. As I understand him, Wittgenstein shows the futility of trying to find meaning in some private headspace.

Between wittgenstein, nietzsche and godel's incompleteness (followed at a distance by hume's induction bit) are very overrepresented references which never actually reference the body of work or if they do the philosopher was supplanted.

I'm not sure what private headspace is but for later witt language determines meaning and language can be private or social. In any case it's what determines meaning for him but that's completely tangential to what we were talking about which was whether terms needed references at all.

Words are clearly dependent on meaning based on the language that instantiates it for him. The 'use' is the application of the language.

Wittgenstein is profound and difficult, despite the honesty of his prose, because we don't want to hear what he's saying, attached as we are to our 'go stories' which are 'obviously' true. This 'obviousness' is the mote in my brother's eye.

If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means - must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?

Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! --Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. --Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. --But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant. — Wittgenstein

Words are clearly dependent on meaning — Shwah

And the world is 'clearly' flat. Don't be surprised if philosophy surprises you after all. Did you visit the florist for common scents?

Words are clearly dependent on meaning based on the language that instantiates it for him. The 'use' is the application of the language. — Shwah

Again, I've not argued words have no meaning. I've argued words need no referent for meaning, and I've not conflated reference for usage.

The bottom line is that Yahweh's existence is not logically required simply because that word has been used. Usage provides meaning, but it doesn't create the referent. That is, you can talk about God and the term can be impregnated with all sorts of meaning from that use, but that does not create the God you're talking about.

The same holds true for the person who believes that Tom Sawyer is non-fiction. They can talk about him, understand him, and be fully wrong about his existence. I'm an A-TomSawyerist in that I disbelieve in his existence.

Yes the world is so big and vast once you learn a new word that others must been in the same position as you.
I intuited you meant language games and you did not get the reference so I cited works. It's very clear what he means by that, it's not at all esoteric, and I referenced an article for you.

Where does a word get its specific meaning then?

You need a word with meaning from wherever you think they get assigned meaning.

There is no possible way to be an a-anything. It's entailing existence to non-existence. To say you *are* a non-existing object is inherently contradictory and I've already specified how it's epistemologically impossible to arrive at an a-anything position.

I'm not one to tell people the signs of a potentially abusive person but they are as obvious as people make them want to be.

I'm just saying that lots of stuff that's 'obvious' is revealed to be just knee-jerk habit as one keeps studying and thinking. I don't mean to offend you. I was genuinely surprised that you looked for a referent for a noun and praised the later Wittgenstein in almost the same breath. I see him as busting up all the 'obvious' stuff so that we see the strangeness of our signal slinging with fresh eyes. For whatever it's worth, this isn't my pet theory but just a paraphrase of various scholars. Here's one more quote from The Blue Book.

The man who is philosophically puzzled sees a law in the way a word is used, and, trying to apply this law consistently, comes up against cases where it leads to paradoxical results. Very often the way the discussion of such a puzzle runs is this: First the question is asked "What is time?" This question makes it appear that what we want is a definition. We mistakenly think that a definition is what will remove the trouble (as in certain states of indigestion we feel a kind of hunger which cannot be removed by eating); The question is then answered by a wrong definition; say: "Time is the motion of the celestial bodies". The next step is to see that this definition is unsatisfactory. But this only means that we don't use the word "time" synonymously with "motion of the celestial bodies". However in saying that the first definition is wrong, we are now tempted to think that we must replace it by a different one, the correct one.

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.

Philosophy, as Wittgenstein with his royal 'we' intends the word, 'is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.' I'm still in therapy myself, egregiously gripped by grammar.