Tuesday, August 14, 2018

So much for theories of everything

Trying to pin everything down is a fool's errand. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Wittgenstein.

"So different is this new perspective that Wittgenstein repeats: 'Don’t think, but look!' (PI 66); and such looking is done vis a vis particular cases, not generalizations. In giving the meaning of a word, any explanatory generalization should be replaced by a description of use. The traditional idea that a proposition houses a content and has a restricted number of Fregean forces (such as assertion, question and command), gives way to an emphasis on the diversity of uses. In order to address the countless multiplicity of uses, their un-fixedness, and their being part of an activity, Wittgenstein introduces the key concept of ‘language-game’. He never explicitly defines it since, as opposed to the earlier ‘picture’, for instance, this new concept is made to do work for a more fluid, more diversified, and more activity-oriented perspective on language."


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