Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Furthermore, I argue that the turn should not make us discard meanings, but only to reappraise them: to see them as the roles of expressions vis-à-vis the rules that govern our language games.

What Wittgenstein is urging here is that as our linguistic games are essentially cooperative, intersubjective enterprises, they cannot rest on anything that is purely subjective. If meaning were impeccably hidden within one's mind, then its presence or absence, from the viewpoint of the language game, would be bound to be irrelevant.

The reason for this shift is that while we persist in seeing the quest for meanings as necessarily underlying and prior to any explanation of our language games, we are kept in the grip of a certain view of the nature of language – the view that a word comes to be meaningful only by being associated, within our mind, with some kind of entity.

We shift our focus from meaning to language games.

However, if the meaning is rather the role of the word within our language games, then the only way to grasp it is to investigate the word's interaction with other words and with the world within the relevant games.

As it is always a sentence (or sometimes perhaps even a supersentential whole) that must be employed for a valid move within a language game and that is hence independently meaningful in this sense, individual meanings can only be the artificially individuated contributions which the individual words bring to the sentence's achieving the moves within the relevant games.

And it is important to see that the indeterminacy of individual meanings is not an indeterminacy of semantics: semantics is a matter of the ability of our linguistic tools to serve as various kinds of vehicles of various language games, and though such an ability is vague in the sense that it is usually not a yes-no 6 matter, it is not indeterminate (indeed it is not even clear what it would mean to call it so).

In my view, here it is essential to pause and distinguish two different theses: (1) The primary target of semantic theory are linguistic practices (aka language games).

And I think that, given (1), it should be reflected as the peculiar status of our language games vis-à-vis the activities of our non-human pals or the clatter of inanimate things.

Our language games and their rules Hence, what is so special about our, human, language games?