Wittgenstein - YouTube

This video is a summary of key points from the ideas of Wittgenstein. I found it remarkably helpful. This is roughly what I took out of it. 

The early Wittgenstein created Tractatus, and later Wittgenstein approached the whole question of language and the assumptions underpinning Tractatus from a very different stance. Philosophical Investigations overturned the assumptions of 2500 years of philosophical investigation.     

Tractatus:

• It began with "The world is all that is the case"  - 
• ie - no metaphysics, just an exhaustive logical statement about what can be achieved through language.  
• A declarative statement is all there is - either inductive or deductive -  but 
• everything else is religion, or neurosis, or ...
  
• It ended with "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence"
• the limits of our language are the limits of our sociological thought - if it cannot be communicated then we cannot share it.   

This is logical positivism - and was highly regarded, well received, and further developed. Analytical philosophy?

BUT Wittgenstein left the academia and, he, himself, questioned the validity of his claims - could he be wrong? - could language be understood differently?

Philosophical Investigations

A paradigm shift occurs when a system of thinking changes its groundwork of theory - or when the question changes in a seismic way.  Wittgenstein changes the question - instead of what is the intrinsic nature of xyz (truth, love, beauty, ethical behaviour ... ) he asks two questions:

• how is a word learnt (or how would one teach it)
• how is a word used (don't seek meaning beyond the way it is used).  

If we explore words like game and chair we find there are many different connotations - words make sense in context, not because they have an intrinsic meaning.   A chair in a dolls house is a chair - but if the purpose is finding a seat to sit on then it is not a chair. 

This kind of thinking leads to the understanding that language games are played in different ways in different places.  And the meanings of words can vary depending on context - and they are often fuzzy - we do not worry about the exact meaning.  

So, what gives coherence to words?  The notion of family resemblances allows the idea that a word can be understood differently in different contexts and yet carry similarities with how it is used in other contexts - both similarities and differences are okay.  

This kind of thinking can be extrapolated to arrive at various forms of relativism, and pragmatism.  The notion, however, that words do not have an ideal meaning, and that lots of technical naming and categorisation is futile is interesting in the sense that everyone is a sense maker. 

Charles Taylor

This is from within the Wikipedia entry on Charles Taylor (under Views para 3-5)

 In his essay "To Follow a Rule," Taylor explores why people can fail to follow rules, and what kind of knowledge it is that allows a person to successfully follow a rule, such as the arrow on a sign. The intellectualist tradition presupposes that to follow directions, we must know a set of propositions and premises about how to follow directions.

Taylor argues that Wittgenstein's solution is that all interpretation of rules draws upon a tacit background. This background is not more rules or premises, but what Wittgenstein calls "forms of life." More specifically, Wittgenstein says in the Philosophical Investigations that "Obeying a rule is a practice." Taylor situates the interpretation of rules within the practices that are incorporated into our bodies in the form of habits, dispositions and tendencies.

Following Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michael Polanyi, and Wittgenstein, Taylor argues that it is mistaken to presuppose that our understanding of the world is primarily mediated by representations. It is only against an unarticulated background that representations can make sense to us. On occasion we do follow rules by explicitly representing them to ourselves, but Taylor reminds us that rules do not contain the principles of their own application: application requires that we draw on an unarticulated understanding or "sense of things" — the background