I finally finished it...I finally understand Wittengod...I understand that...I understand him, and yet, I have no clue what his actual point is. If somebody asked me to briefly summarize what Philosophical Investigations is about. I could only say "Words have meaning, its how we ordinarily use them, but at the same time they have no actual meaning and cant actually say anything about anything, that isnt fundamentally the literal use of the word in and of itself".

Honestly people constantly paint this guy as way more hostile to philosophy than he seems to be. It basically just feels like he thinks nothing can really mean anything and hes the first guy truly content enough with that fact to instill no values to anything, I think thats why It feels like he has no point. Even Nietzsche that challenged all meaning, still had an overarching philosophy that essentially said everything is will to power and suffering is good actually.

Anyway time to finally watch Jade Vine's video on this book.

midwittgenstein

>>24505285
wittgod not popular here?

>>24505290
Hegelians and other lefties, and christcucks hate him for dismantling their wordcelling

>>24506467
I understand, his revised arguments in philosophical investigations is almost impossible to challenge. So i dont. My biggest problem with PI. Is that he basically validates the poor ways in which oridinary people use language, simply because "thats just how its supposed to be used". Words sort of dont really mean anything essentially and its all about use and context in a language game. If we take this as true (pretty hard to not to honestly). This essentially validates peoples use of words like "nazi" where they can apply it to people who arent nazis to get the derogatory effecy of implying that somebody is UNIQUELY as bad or close to as bad as the nazis and all the number of connotations and associations that come with this.

My problem with this has always been thats its essentially cheating language. The person that uses words so useless objectively cannot be meaning "nazi" literally. But it doesnt matter because the only way the word can have any SPECIFIC value is to intend to mean it literally and bring out all the things uniquely associated with the word.

And this is EXACTLY right. This is why words dont really have an essential meaning. This is what wittgenstein is talking about being on display I think. Words are just something used to communicate some vague encompassing meaning via use. Words are like "tools" and in this case. The word "nazi" is a bludgeon to hit somebody over the head with. Or a target to be draped over for an arrow to be let loose on.

What do you guys think? Am I wrong? Stupid? Recently coming to this board ive gotten a bit insecure that im actually fairly stupid and can never and will never understand philosphers enough to criticize them, because of all the ways people come up with that some other philosphers like hegel and fichte or whatever are misunderstood because of their fancy elaborate concepts.

>>24505281 (OP)
Is the anime pic guy really the best explanation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus

>>24506532
nazi as word is context dependent like every other.
A hammer is used for hammering. If we change what we apply the hammer to, then hammering changes as well -> the hammer as word changed definition.
So it is the same with nazi. It does not mean an adherent to national-socialist doctrine anymore, because we apply it differently

>>24506682
Yes. I know and understand that. But that is my problem. Wittgenstein essentially appeals to ordinary use because its justified by pure virtue of that is how it is. But "that is how it is" especially in regards to language which is something fundamentally made up. Is BAD and destructive to truth or meaning. And yes, I know Wittgenstein would likely reject the idea of any inherent meaning and I dont have the sophistication to challenge that. But how can I be told that the way in which "Nazi" is now and can be used is remotely reasonable?

How can it be reasonably used literally and non literally at the same time. But more importantly how can it be allowed to be used in such a conveniently and unfairly disparaging way without even any justified basis? What can anything mean other than what is wanted to be meant irrespective of how much that engages with the complexities of reality?

After all. Language does not. Dictate reality.

>>24505285
>the king of the thread
I kneel

>>24506763
>After all. Language does not. Dictate reality.
Yes, and that's why he's midwittgenstein
>>24506467
Hegel wasn't a lefty

>>24506814
>Hegel wasn't a lefty

>>24506532
>I understand, his revised arguments in philosophical investigations is almost impossible to challenge

Quite the opposite. Arguments from underdetermination like the rule following and private were well known to the ancients but also considered to be easily dismissed. Only materialism and the resultant empiricist epistemic presuppositions made them a sort of "crisis."

>>24506532
It's too simple. That use fixes meaning is an insight as old as Saint Augustine but Wittgenstein absolutizes it in such a way that it seems to lead to relativism, particularly in On Certainty. It's quintessential Boomer phil in that it packs that unique one-two punch on ignorance and arrogance that doesn't bother to look at what others had said about this at all prior to theorizing.

It leads to a view where language always refers only to language, a sort of box, the recreation of the Cartesian box just in a slightly different form, and doesn't even anticipate the realist response to this because Wittgenstein never read Aristotle, let alone conducted any sort of study of philosophy outside his narrow bubble.

>>24506859
But doesnt Wittgenstein respond more or less directly to Augustine? I dont know enough about the specific history to go indepth into this, but look at this https://youtu.be/bIo_p3b0JRk Ive been watching it after reading PI to get a refresher and rebreather on the concepts

>>24506878
No, he cites a single Augustine quote to open PI and horribly misrepresents Augustine as having a terribly naive philosophy of language while at the same time seeming to steal things from him. Pretty sure he only read Confessions though and never any of the heavier philosophy of language stuff.

>>24506895
I dont understand your criticism then. What exactly is it about Augustine or Aristotle that dismisses Wittgenstein's arguments?

>>24505281 (OP)
If you can't explain it then you don't understand it well enough.

>>24505285
Hmm, interesting, since 2010 this pun has only been made 28 times, according to warosu. I expected a bit more.

>>24506763
Using "Nazi" to mean someone who's highly authoritarian and/or racist seems much the same as using "vandal" to mean someone who damages other people's property or "philistine" to mean someone who has no respect for art.

>>24506933
>Using "Nazi" to mean someone who's highly authoritarian and/or racist
Theres a couple of problems here
>someone whos highly authoritarian
it assumes not only that "highly" can be used meaningfully to indicate somebodys relative degree of "authoritarianness" but also assumes authoritarianness is even some sort of stable and absolute concept. Same with racist.

The word is incoherent 1st of all because 90% of people dont even have a coherent structure belief structure of their own, so most of the people its going to be applied to, are going to simultaneously value "freedoms" and what can be construed as "authoritarianism" is it authoritarian and racist for israel to essentially be a military state against the middle east? Some would say yes, but plenty would say its absurd to imply a jewish state is Nazi.

I dont have problems criticizing words like vandal or philistine, but i have never been against the idea that words arent real and can change and have different meanings. My problem with the use of nazi, is that despite literally not beings used in any essence appealing way, it is still appealing to some essence of the word, to lambast somebody. Thats why it doesnt matter that words meanings can change, because the word "Nazi" even when used broadly and meaninglessly, still seeks to evoke its original meaning.

Do you understand?

>auidobook
>I finally finished it

>>24507094
what are you implying?

>>24506908
Wittgenstein is very vague and has been taken in many different directions. One is cognitive relativism, which is an extreme version of relativism. There is actually a good deal in his text to support this thesis, although there are other readings. But many other readings also lead to very radical conclusions re truth and meaning. Kripke is another example here. And, if you accept the rule following argument from underdetermination, then it would seem that Quine's similar arguments re reference and knowledge would go. But the result of this is arguably radical skepticism, just of a sort its proponents claim we can and do "live with."

Likewise, Sausserean semiotics gets extended in post-structuralist into equally radical theses.

Is this unavoidable? No. There are other explanations of language that I think explain it in some ways significantly better that also ground a robust and much more intuitive realism. The tripartite semiotics CSP inherited from the scholastics is just one example.

Ultimately, the hinge proposition thesis, as radical as it is, isn't even new. Islamic and Christian thinkers in the Middle Ages came up with the same idea as a way to address seeming disconnects between philosophy/science and revealed religion. But the idea of mutually contradictory truths in different games obviously carries with it many problems, the most obvious being that it seems to have a hard time keeping our a slide into full Protagorean relativism in any robust way.

>>24505281 (OP)
PI is written is such an incredibly annoying style. I cannot fathom listening to it.

>>24507190
I do admit I agree with this. He just starts and stops waaay too much. A lot of times he'll essentially say something like "language is used to say what a person says...and we should make sure to remember that" and then he'll just move on to another point. Im embelleshing quite a bit, but maybe you get the point.

But I finished listening to it because it really is just that compelling. I always try to read other people interpretations afterwards to ground my own perspective for which to interpret accurately myself.

>>24506467
Without words we'd just gesture at each other like apes. The power of Midwittgenstein.

Wittgod just destroys faux philosophy vros that memorize systems thats why they seethe so hard at him

>we ascribe meaning to words but ultimately they are just social constructs
wow.... so revolutionary...

>>24507695
thats not what hes saying. pain isn't a social construct, infact social constructs arent real because society isnt inherent, its just become dominantly normalized, there was a time we didnt all live so close together, the language games played then would be of a similar constitution

>>24507216
your 'philosophy' is so far estranged from the meaning words carry that it is not communication at all

words are symbols and compression of meaning, what that symbol stands for and what meaning is compressed into it shifts and depends on who is using it
a word that once used to mean a specific thing can over time become a symbolic placeholder or vessel for any kind of idea or feeling associated with it
just as with the word nazi you used as an example, it used to be agreed upon that a nazi is a national socialist, but not just anyone, not one from russia, but specifically one from germany
if you hear nazi, you associate it with ss uniforms, hitler, ausschwitze, jews, wooden doors and anne frank
but then people started to associate all kind of things with it and it (grammar nazi, feminazi,…) became synonymous with someone trying to tell others what‘s right and what‘s wrong and to have a superiority complex based on the fact that weimar germany was frivolous and liberated and one of the reasons the third reich even came to be, in an attempt to smash the hedonistic escalation
thats how more association and meaning got compressed into a symbol that once was used for a specific thing, language in itself is compression and symbol
every word is an attempt to create a symbol for a concept, a thought, a feeling and an attempt to compress meaning into agreed upon form, but it will always fall short and it will never be as complete as if we could just transfer how something feels in our consciousness to another consciousness directly, it‘s always a loss of information to have to use any form of communication
I think thats what he was trying to get at, that words are incomplete attempts to compress meaning but it‘s the best method we have for now, so it will have to do

>>24508149
>I think thats what he was trying to get at
No its not. Because your fundamental premise that language is "symbols" is something he constantly argues against and dispels.
let alone the idea that words have "meaning" that is compressed into symbols lmao no dawg. even ignoring what wittgenstein is saying youre retarded. thats a retarded use of the word "meaning" and if theres anything im thankful of wittgenstein for, its that his philosophy completely dispels the idea that we ordinarily use words as if they have some "essence" or "meaning".
no, if they did, they wouldnt be used so arbitrarily. we use words like tools, something useful to shape the "world" with. signs and symbols is the surface level, literal way of understanding language that is still too naive to give too much credit to it, as if language is intelligent.

woah...