Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The space of meaningfulness The physical space in which we live our lives is formed by certain laws – the laws making some of the things we can think of doing (flying by ourselves, living under water ...) impossible, thereby delimiting a certain spectrum of possibilities.

In a sense, the space is the spectrum of the possibilities.

The basic difference between such a man-made space and the nature-made 'real' space is in that the former, in contrast to the latter, is not a matter of making some courses of action impossible, but rather of making them merely improper.

The spaces may be also more or less embodied – i.e. their possibilities may to some extent depend on those of the real space.

Although it is a matter of a relatively small collection of rules, they institute a space of chess games which is vast and incomprehensible not just for human reason, but as yet also for our most advanced computers.

Even a small deviation from the current rules could potentially corrupt the whole space (in the sense that there may emerge an obvious winning strategy for one of the players).

And to be truly within the space, to enjoy the thrill of moving through it and winning or losing, one must accept the rules – the price of their recurrent violation would be one's own expulsion from the paradise of chess.

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.

Meaning is what emerges within the intricately orchestrated (arch)space that we have somehow brought into being through accepting the rules which govern our language games (and especially the game which Brandom, 1994, calls the game of giving and asking for reasons).

I was disposed straightway to search for other truths and when I had represented to myself the object of the geometers, which I conceived to be a continuous body or a space indefinitely extended in length, breadth, and height or depth, divisible into divers parts which admit of different figures and sizes, and of being moved or transposed in all manner of ways (for all this the geometers suppose to be in the object they contemplate), I went over some of their simplest demonstrations.