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.

And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live. And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs.

The mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign.

We give them their meaning in that we use them in a peculiar way. Besides private associations, what is needed to establish meaning are some public practices that make the associations public and shared.

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

But we can imagine also a modified picture: namely that what is inherited is not the pattern itself, but rather the tendency to make others display it – to support those of one's pals who display it and to ostracize those who do not. Before starting to wonder how realistic such a picture is, let us add one more modification.

A rule is a lever necessary for putting to work the exclusively human kind of forming and maintaining of patterns – it is "an embodied generalization which to speak loosely but suggestively, tends to make itself true" (Sellars, 1949, 299).

It is the latter sense that is constitutive to the very game of chess – it is the rules of chess which make it possible to play chess at all (hence to play chess wrongly in the second sense means not to play it at all; and to play either rightly or wrongly in the first sense presupposes to play rightly in the second one.) The rules of chess are explicitly written down and the players see their own and their opponents' moves as right or wrong (i.e. assume normative attitudes to them) according to whether they are or are not in accordance with the rules.

It is the latter sense that is constitutive to the very language of English – it is the rules of the language which make it possible to speak English at all (hence to speak English wrongly in the second sense means not to speak English at all; and to speak English either rightly or wrongly in the first sense presupposes to speak rightly in the second.

It is the rules of chess that make a piece used to play the game into a pawn, a bishop, a king etc.