Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

He calls this kind of behavior pattern governed: "an organism may come to play a language game – that is to move from position to position in a system of moves and positions and to do it 'because of the system' without having to obey rules and hence without having to be playing a metalanguage game" (ibid.

For the entities we mention to help specify a state of mind{ XE "mind" } do not have to play any psychological or epistemological role at all, just as numbers play no physical role.

One can play chess rightly (or wrongly).

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

The rules of language create a huge space of meaningfulness, the space in which we can play our language games, meaningfully communicate and, indeed, think in our distinctively human way. It is only within such a space that something can become meaningful in the way in which our words are, in contrast to the way in which mere useful tools are. I have also endeavored to show that the basic material out of which the space of meaningfulness (along with many of its poorer relatives, such as that of chess games) is built are rules.

It follows from the considerations of Dummett (1974), that even if we consider that of the Fregean terms which is really closer to the intuitive concept of meaning, namely his Sinn (sense), we are likely to encounter a parallel ambiguity, for Fregean senses have come to be taken to play two incompatible roles: to explicate what a linguistic agent grasps when she grasps words, and to determine the corresponding Bedeutung, i.e. extension.

This implies that the meaning of an expression is not a thing to be discovered within the extralinguistic world, but rather something as the value of the expression, the materialisation of the role of the expression within the system of language and within the language games that we play.

To answer this question, it is not enough to consider (3) in isolation: if it is isolated from the body of DRT, it obviously provides us with no semantic analysis at all, for any formula or diagram can successfully play the role of semantic analysatum only as a node within a large structure expounding relevant relations.

Now what role do truth and falsity play in such language-games?