Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

You cook badly if you are guided in your cooking by rules other than the right ones; but if you follow other rules than those of chess you are playing another game; and if you follow grammatical rules other than such and such ones, that does not mean you say something wrong, no, you are speaking of something else.

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.

However, the relevant rules of English are not explicitly written down (with the exception of the rules of forming grammatically correct English expressions) and hence they exist merely through the speakers' taking their own and their fellow speakers' utterances for right or wrong (i.e. through their normative attitudes).

The meanings of the words are exclusively a matter of the rules to which the words are subjected, and the rules are the 16 treating some moves as right and others as wrong.

However, it would be essentially wrong to interpret this structural indeterminacy as implying that we cannot know what the meanings of our expressions are. The right interpretation is rather that meanings are not definite in the sense presupposed by the semiotic view.

The effort to explain cognitive synonymy first, for the sake of deriving analyticity from it afterward as in Section I, is perhaps the wrong approach.

This exhibits a wrong idea of logical analysis: logical analysis is taken as being like chemical analysis.

Compare how differently the word "false" comes into the game where the child is taught to shout "red" when red appears and the game where he is to guess the weather, supposing now that we use the word "false" in the following circumstances: when he shouts "green" when something red appears, and when he makes a wrong guess about the weather.

We mean all sorts of things by "proposition", and it is wrong to start with a definition of a proposition and build up logic from that.

Would this be right or wrong?