Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

It culminates in the writings of Jacques Derrida, where the rejection of psychologism and of the traditional conception of meaning is interconnected with the author's case against what he calls the "metaphysics of the presence" and "logocentrism", which inevitably leads to a very eccentric kind of philosophizing (of course, a center is no longer recognized .

To indicate the kind of answers Wittgenstein has to these worries, let me quote him at length: Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning.

Frege's idea 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 3 Such a theory of mind might seem self-contradictory; however, it has been proffered, e.g., by Davidson (2001).

And given the public practices are in place, the private associations become the idle beetle in the box.) However, is this not a kind of sophistry?

True, a thing’s being put to a certain kind of use can give it a kind of significance, but is this the kind which is characteristic of meaningful words?

What miraculous kind of use could make a word acquire a genuine meaning, such as those we experience when we talk?

Wittgenstein's answer is that it is a certain kind of rule-governed employment; and therefore he pays such an attention to the concepts of rule and rule following: For Frege, the choice was as follows: either we are dealing with ink marks on paper or else these marks are signs of something, and what they represent is their meaning.

Hence if we were to follow Wittgenstein, we would have to clarify what peculiar kind of rulegoverned game can constitute a melting-pot from which genuine meanings can emerge.

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.

The shift in focus yields a kind of turn which can be labelled 'pragmatic'4 (understanding the term as a referring to giving pride of place to the practical5): the turn from studying language as a system of signifiers associated with their respective signifieds to studying it as a tool for interaction.