So how is believing that there is no society working out for you? — baker
Are you suggesting that the idea of a form of life is an elaboration of the earlier position? — Jamal
Man possesses the capacity of constructing languages, in which every sense can be expressed, without having an idea how and what each word means just as one speaks without knowing how the single sounds are produced.
Colloquial language is a part of the human organism and is not less complicated than it.
From it it is humanly impossible to gather immediately the logic of language. Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.
The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated. — ibid. 4.002
This remark provides a key to the question, to what extent solipsism is a truth. In fact what solipsism means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself. That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which only I understand) mean the limits of my world. — 5.62
If there were a law of causality, it might be put in the following way: There are laws of nature.
But of course, that cannot be said: it makes itself manifest.
The application of logic decides what elementary propositions there are.
What lies in the application logic cannot anticipate.
It is clear that logic may not collide with its application.
But logic must have contact with its application.
Therefore logic and its application may not overlap one another. — ibid. 5.557
324. Would it be correct to say that it is a matter of induction, and that I am as certain that I shall be able to continue the series, as I am that this book will drop on the ground when I let it go; and that I should be no less astonished if I suddenly and for no obvious reason got stuck in working out the series, than I should be if the book remained hanging in the air instead of falling?—To that I will reply that we don't need any grounds for this certainty either. What could justify the certainty better than success?
325. "The certainty that I shall be able to go on after I have had this experience—seen the formula, for instance,—is simply based on induction." What does this mean?—"The certainty that the fire will burn me is based on induction." Does that mean that I argue to myself: "Fire has always burned me, so it will happen now too?" Or is the previous experience the cause of my certainty, not its ground? Whether the earlier experience is the cause of the certainty depends on the system of hypotheses, of natural laws, in which we are considering the phenomenon of certainty.
Is our confidence justified?—What people accept as a justification— is shewn by how they think and live. — Philosophical Investigations, 324
In the later Wittgenstein the notion of "forms of life" takes the place of the Tractarian doctrine of the boundary between what can and cannot be said, which determines in turn the "limits of my world". My world takes on the limits of my form of life. — Jean-Pierre Cometti, 'Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, and the question of expression'
How do you suppose that this passage says anything whatsoever about what cannot be said? How could "recognizing our condition" produce any conclusions about "what cannot be said"? — Metaphysician Undercover
Those are limits of what can be "pictured" in Wittgenstein's schema. The problem is that it is very obvious that language provides us with a whole lot more creativity than just a basic capacity to draw some simple pictures. Therefore this provides us with no information concerning what can or cannot be said. — Metaphysician Undercover
There is another completely distinct category of empirical reality which concerns the activities of objects. And a "picture" does not ever capture the activity. — Metaphysician Undercover
Hume stated this position, the foundation of induction is psychological rather than logical. But Hume's efforts to prove this (inductive) principle logically only serve to demonstrate the falsity of it. — Metaphysician Undercover
What appears to happen in the Tractatus is that Wittgenstein discovers the reality that the primary premise is false, that a large part of the world consists of what is other than fact. But instead of recognizing that language has naturally developed to speak of this other part of the world in ways other than truth-apt propositions, he makes the faulty conclusion that we cannot speak about this part of the world. — Metaphysician Undercover
6.4312 The temporal immortality of the soul of man, that is to say, its eternal survival also after death, is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption in the first place will not do for us what we always tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive for ever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.
(It is not problems of natural science which have to be solved.) — ibid.
2.16 In order to be a picture a fact must have something in common with what it pictures.
2.161 In the picture and the pictured there must be something identical in order that the one can be a picture of the other at all.
2.17 What the picture must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it after its manner rightly or falsely is its form of representation.
2.171 The picture can represent every reality whose form it has.
The spatial picture, everything spatial, the coloured, everything coloured, etc.
2.172 The picture, however, cannot represent its form of representation; it shows it forth.
2.173 The picture represents its object from without (its standpoint is its form of representation), therefore the picture represents its object rightly or falsely.
2.174 But the picture cannot place itself outside of its form of representation.
2.223 In order to discover whether the picture is true or false we must compare it with reality.
2.224 It cannot be discovered from the picture alone whether it is true or false.
2.225 There is no picture which is apriori true.
3 The logical picture of the facts is the thought.
3.22 In the proposition the name represents the object.
3.221 Objects I can only name. Signs represent them. I can only speak
of them. I cannot assert them. A proposition can only say how a thing is, not what it is.
3.262 What does not get expressed in the sign is shown by its application. What the signs conceal, their application declares.
4.0312 The possibility of propositions is based upon the principle of the representation of objects by signs. My fundamental thought is that the logical constants do not represent. That the logic of the facts cannot be represented. — ibid.
5.556 There cannot be a hierarchy of the forms of the elementary propositions. Only that which we ourselves construct can we foresee.
5.5561 Empirical reality is limited by the totality of objects. The boundary appears again in the totality of elementary propositions.
The hierarchies are and must be independent of reality. — ibid.
6.36 If there were a law of causality, it might run: There are natural laws.
But that can clearly not be said: it shows itself.
6.363 The process of induction is the process of assuming the simplest law that can be made to harmonize with our experience.
6.3631 This process, however, has no logical foundation but only a psychological one. It is clear that there are no grounds for believing that the simplest course of events will really happen. — ibid.
But the idea that language consists of truth-apt propositions was derived from the faulty premise, that the world consists of facts. — Metaphysician Undercover
Aristotle proposed that we allow a violation of the law of excluded middle to accommodate becoming. Others have proposed that becoming violates the law of non-contradiction. In any case, this aspect of "the world" cannot be understood as consisting of facts. But this does not mean that we cannot speak about, or even understand this aspect. — Metaphysician Undercover
More interesting than such questions of comparative detail is Mr Wittgenstein's attitude towards the mystical. His attitude upon this grows naturally out of his doctrine in pure logic, according to which the logical proposition is a picture (true or false) of the fact, and has in common with the fact a certain structure. It is this common structure which makes it capable of being a picture of the fact, but the structure cannot itself be put into words, since it is a structure of words, as well as of the facts to which they refer. Everything, therefore, which is involved in the very idea of the expressiveness of language must remain incapable of being expressed in language, and is, therefore, inexpressible in a perfectly precise sense. This inexpressible contains, according to Mr Wittgenstein, the whole of logic and philosophy. — ibid. page 18
OK, should there be a shadow to the right of the station? — BC
For Aristotle, the hierarchical ordering of the different kinds of beings is based on the extent to which form predominates over matter in each. — Eric D Perl Thinking Being - Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition
The world is the totality of facts, not of things. — Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1.1
The Greeks had a word for those who consistently engaged in fallacy, and it wasn’t “philosopher”. — NOS4A2
We must therefore be content if, in dealing with subjects and starting from premises thus uncertain, we succeed in presenting a broad outline of the truth: when our subjects and our premises are merely generalities, it is enough if we arrive at generally valid conclusions. Accordingly we may ask the student also to accept the various views we put forward in the same spirit; for it is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness in each kind which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to demand strict demonstration from an orator. — Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1094b
While we all might be quite happy to be informed our respective “I”’s can’t be really real, we still might be a little reserved in our happiness from being informed it’s no more than an intellectual conception. — Mww
if something thinks then by definition it must exist. — Janus
I don't see the judgement as an empirical one — Janus
"...it is impossible to make sense of what it is to follow a rule correctly, unless this means that what one is doing is following the practice of others who are like-minded"
It seems that this is the sort of thing that Jamal has in mind, and yet it is not found in Kant. — Banno
* The "I think" is, as has already been said, an empirical proposition, and contains within itself the proposition "I exist." But I cannot say "Everything that thinks, exists"; for then the property of thinking would make all beings possessing it into necessary beings. Hence my existence also cannot be regarded as inferred from the proposition "I think," as Descartes held (for otherwise the major premise, "Everything that thinks, exists" would have to precede it), — CPR, Kant, B421
The lack of an underlying logical structure is the position Wittgenstein moved on toward in the Philosophical Investigations, with "family resemblance" — Metaphysician Undercover
So language, and the various language-games, would trump logic or structure. — J
What Kant has to say in the paralogisms is about “rational psychology” and the indeterminacy of the “I”. It is certainly a consequence of the transcendental perspective but I can’t quite see its specific relevance. — Jamal
Nor do I. Actually though, I don’t know what you mean. — Jamal
The transcendental perspective concerns the necessary conditions for the human experience of the world and defines the limits of this experience and the knowledge of objects therein; and from this perspective, the world around us, what is real in experience, is limited accordingly: the limits of my experience mean the limits of my world. — Jamal
From all this one sees that rational psychology has its origin in a mere misunderstanding. The unity of consciousness, which grounds the categories, is here taken for an intuition of the subject as an object, and the category of substance is applied to it. But this unity is only the unity of thinking, through which no object is given; and thus the category of substance, which always presupposes a given intuition, cannot be applied to it, and hence this subject cannot be cognized at all. Thus the subject of the categories cannot, by thinking them, obtain a concept of itself as an object of the categories; for in order to think them, it must take its pure self-consciousness, which is just what is to be explained, as its ground. Likewise, the subject, in which the representation of time originally has its ground, cannot thereby determine its own existence in time, and if the latter cannot be, then the former as a determination of itself (as a thinking being in general) through categories can also not take place. *
* The "I think" is, as has already been said, an empirical proposition, and contains within itself the proposition "I exist." But I cannot say "Everything that thinks, exists"; for then the property of thinking would make all beings possessing it into necessary beings. Hence my existence also cannot be regarded as inferred from the proposition "I think," as Descartes held (for otherwise the major premise, "Everything that thinks, exists" would have to precede it), but rather it is identical with it. It expresses an indeterminate empirical intuition, i.e., a perception (hence it proves that sensation, which consequently belongs to sensibility, grounds this existential proposition), but it precedes the experience that is to determine the object of perception through the category in regard to time; and here existence is not yet a category, which is not related to an indeterminately given object, but rather to an object of which one has a concept, and about which one wants to know whether or not it is posited outside this concept. An indeterminate perception here signifies only something real, which was given, and indeed only to thinking in general, thus not as appearance, and also not as a thing in itself (a noumenon), but rather as something that in fact exists and is indicated as an existing thing in the proposition "I think." For it is to be noted that if I have called the proposition "I think" an empirical proposition, I would not say by this that the I in this proposition is an empirical representation; for it is rather purely intellectual, because it belongs to thinking in general. Only without any empirical representation, which provides the material for thinking, the act I think would not take place, and the empirical is only the condition of the application, or use, of the pure intellectual faculty. — CPR, Kant, B421
The language games that constitute the lives of human beings thereby constitute the human "form of life," because human beings are linguistic to the core. — Jamal