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.

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

However, let us return to Wittgenstein's answer to the question about the peculiarity of our language games: these games, we noted, are characteristically governed by rules.

What is peculiar about this is that the rules are implicit within our linguistic practices, rather than explicitly formulated.

We can have explicit rules of, say, chess or football; however, we cannot have explicit rules for using language – at least not generally.

Would we dream of doing this without mentioning the rules, without saying that during a football game, the ball ought not to be touched by hand, that a player ought to avoid kicking his opponents etc.

Perhaps the relevant question to ask here is whether the talk about rules is naturalizable.

Can we see the talk about the rules of football, and about what ought or ought not to be done during a football game, as a mere metaphor (or shorthand, or loose talk) which could be translated into a talk about the movements of the players, or something else wholly susceptible to expression in terms of the language of natural science?

Personally I confess that I have no deep convictions over whether, for example, the statement A football player ought not touch the ball with his hands (or, for that matter, Football has such and such rules) can, without a residuum, be translated into a non-normative claim couched in the naturalistic idiom.

As Sellars (1949, 311) puts it "To say that man is a rational animal is to say that man is a creature not of habits, but of rules."