[ctw]

I read the first 100 pages or so of Philisophical Investigations before giving up since I had lost track of the lines of reasoning. Here's what I got out of what I did read though:

Language is far more important in philosophy and life than we think. The biggest takeaway I got from the part of this book I read is a way of looking at problems with the limitations of language in mind. Ask yourself: to what extent is thinking speaking? What is thinking without language? Is it even possible, or is that something else?

There's this interesting idea that has stuck with me, which is that when we say words, "pictures" are "brought before" our mind. Is language (speaking, reading/writing) simply a way for us to conjure up these mental images in other people's minds? If so, how can we be sure that what they see is what we intended for them to see? I think it's clear from experience that the images are mostly right, most of the time. But when they're not, we have misunderstandings. Another interesting statement made in the book (iirc) is that we only need more language when we feel there is a misunderstanding. The word "more" is important in the previous sentence. The idea here is that when we speak, we have some desired outcome from the outset. Once we feel that our speaking has led to the outcome we wanted, we are satisfied to stop speaking. It is only when the person we're speaking to isn't doing what we want, or seems to be getting the wrong mental picture that we need to continue speaking (this is what I meant by "more language": to continue speaking).

There's another interesting area Wittgenstein explores (which I can't admit to following very well), but I'll try to conjure a mental image in your head of it ;). Basically, so far his argument (if I understood correctly) is that "the truth" is the mental images we see and the actions we take, and language is just a means to those ends. He then argues (again, if I understood him correctly) that we usually run into trouble when we take language as the starting point of knowledge. That's not very clear, so what do I mean by that? It's sort of like, words work well when we're using them to achieve some outcome. But they start to confuse us when we use them without a desired outcome from the outset: when we use them to gain knowledge. Words are not facts that we can logically make deductions from to discover new knowledge.

[mabub24]

Philosophical Investigations is not exactly hard to read, but the style of argument Wittgenstein uses is very slippery. He's trying to poke holes in the conceptual pictures and assumptions we use, and which often lead us to nonsense or philosophical debates that can be dissolved through conceptual clarification. It's nothing less than a full on broadside against an entire tradition of philosophical thought extending back to Plato.

I would say the first 100 or so pages of the book are a form of conceptual cartography around language. Later, he uses that "grammatical analysis" to look at psychology, vision, pain, and many other topics.

There are a lot of incredibly consequential arguments and thought experiments in the book, but you can pare them down to some generalizations:

- Language is a form of behavior.

- Language is public and cannot be fundamentally private. As are rules and rule following.

- For almost every case, meaning is use in a form of life (there are some caveats, like color, which also rely on an ostensive definition). An explanation of the "grammar" of a word, is an explanation of a rule for the use of the word in a particular context.

- Understanding is akin to an ability.

- Many of our complex mental and cognitive and cogitative abilities, are manifest in our behavior, the most rich and complex being language.

- Fundamental skepticism, of a Cartesian sort, is nonsense. Humans are social animals with the ability for an enormously complex language rich in concepts; the mind/body, inside/outside, distinction is a false picture that leads to nonsense. Do not mistake the personal for the private.

[psychoslave]

> Words are not facts that we can logically make deductions from to discover new knowledge.

Did you acquire this conviction through thoughts arisen by Wittgenstein’s words?

[ctw]

I think we're interpreting that in different ways. I'm assuming you read it as something like "words can't be used to communicate (knowledge)", which you're seeking to disprove by showing me that I only gained that knowledge through Wittgenstein's words. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

That's not what I meant though. I meant that words are like signs; they point at the real thing. We must be careful not to confuse the sign for the thing itself. We can't simply rearrange words and assume that what this new sign, this new combination of words points to, is "real". Not all words or sentences point to anything, or anything meaningful. And the trap we sometimes fall into (as philosophers especially?) is assuming that they always mean something.

Edit: First the thing exists, then we use a word to refer to it. The mistake is reversing that, by thinking that by creating new words or combinations of words, we can bring something into existence.

[sparsely]

This was a really clarifying comment for me, thank you.

It links nicely with the positivists' ideas about meaningful/non meaningful statements as well - which I believe were inspired by Wittgenstein.

[qqtt]

Just to put a button this excellent summary, the classic example of "rearranging words to form a sentence that we think has meaning" that Wittgenstein uses in Investigations is the question: "What is the meaning of life?"

We think intuitively that because we constructed this sentence with words, that it must have meaning, and must have an answer - as you say, it is flipping the causal relationship between starting with a sign and using language versus starting with language and trying to find a sign. This question is ultimately the latter.

[psychoslave]

>Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Would my opinion be that you are wrong, it would not imply that:

- I'm right about you being wrong;

- my own view is right and spread it would be an act of correction.

> I meant that words are like signs; they point at the real thing.

Nothingness doesn't point at anything real by definition.

> We must be careful not to confuse the sign for the thing itself.

Nor the sign with an interpretation act stimulated by some sign.

> We can't simply rearrange words and assume that what this new sign, this new combination of words points to, is "real".

Words don't exist outside some interpretation process, by the way.

>Edit: First the thing exists, then we use a word to refer to it.

That's a bit trickier. Because before someone use a word to refer to something, this word didn't exist. Naming things is a performative action. Through words, not only can you gain new knowledge that you can challenge through non-verbal actions, but they change the reality itself as it introduces new relationships in the world that where not present before there were used as a reference tool.

[jhickok]

This is the exact sort of question that Wittgenstein addresses and created a terrifying argument to press a wedge into. In the Investigations he formulates the Rule Following Argument which in many aspects mirrors the underdetermination argument for computational anti-realism; any physical state embodies any computational function under some arbitrary description (also known as pancomputationalism or computational trivialism). Wittgenstein intended to show-- and I think succeeded-- that meanings are underdetermined logically, and thus non-rational (not irrational) forces determine how one means something. Thus, causal structures of social bodies that holistically determine meanings.

This argument was initially somewhat ignored until revived by the great Saul Kripke in his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. I take this to be one of the great epistemological problems, joining the ranks of similar challenges like Descartes' demon. Like Descartes, Wittgenstein offered a solution, albeit a much less religious one than Descartes.