Of course, any piece that disappears halfway through the game could not count as a queen…
One might picture the players saying “Bugger, there it goes again – grab that shot glass and use it as the Queen instead” – and continuing the game.
In chess, the pieces can only be removed from the game in accord with the rules.
So it’s not clear to me that “The pieces stay for the duration” is not one of the constitutive rules of chess, even if it is unstated in the FIDE Laws of Chess. Indeed, it is implicit in the rules of chess that the Queen or any other piece cannot disappear, since 2.3 positions them on their squares, and the only way in which they may be removed is given by 3.1 and 4.6c.
So arguably, that the pieces do not disappear is an implicit constitutive rule in Chess.
Language games have content. They are about something. Although he abandoned the idea that there is logical scaffold underlying both the world and language, he did not reject the point that there are propositions or things we say about the world. And that philosophy does not make such statements.
There are language games of science but that does not mean that science is a language game. It is a practice.
Wittgenstein is not saying that the assumption forms the basis of another language game. It forms the basis of action and thought. And not thought of another language game.
The language games of science are not about language games.
Thsi may have been covered. Is the use of language itself a hinge commitment? It seems that assuming language maps onto reality is a kind of presupposition.
Controversial. After Davidson, I’d reject this sort of scheme/content dualism. Did Wittgenstein also reject such a dualism? A matter of some contention.
But doesn’t your rejection already presuppose that words and reality are connected in some way? To accept or reject the idea that language maps onto reality, you must still assume that language makes some kind of contact with reality (and it’s certainly a condition of intelligibility), otherwise your rejection would not be about anything. Or something like that.
Actually, I’m don’t have any commitments either way. But I would be interested to read you unpacking this a little more if you have any interest.
The realist argues that language must connect with reality, because without that connection the idea of truth makes no sense. The anti-representationalist presumably responds that the idea of language “mapping” reality assumes we can step outside language and compare it with the world, which we cannot do. The hinge response says that, whatever terms we use, meaningful speech already assumes that our words account for how things are. Without that basic connection, the difference between true and false couldn’t function.
The problem is not with there being a connection between reality and words, but with that connection consisting in a mapping. The implication is that there is a reality that is seperate from our talk about it - the myth of the given and so on.
There’s two readings of Wittgenstein - well, two among many - that take quite different approaches. One holds that he pretty much kept the world/word stricture of the Tractatus, that while he dropped the picture theory he did not drop the duality of world and word. In this account language games latch on to the world, and that seems to be what F4 has in mind. The other view is that that Wittgenstein ended up replacing the duality with something quite different, in which the difference between world and word dissipated. On this account reality is a part of, and not seperate from, our practice; but how that works is variously explained.
Now I read Davidson as extending the second approach. A long story, easily misrepresented and misunderstood. I’d rather not go in ti that here, but stick to looking at the nature of certainties.
Yes, I think you’re right. I didn’t mean to indicate any sort of linguistic or rational thinking; it was just the first word that came to me. A “presumption” instead perhaps? But maybe there isn’t a better term for it than those Wittgenstein uses, such as “hinge”, “ground” or “animal certainty”.
I think that’s right. But it seems to me that the concept of a hinge presupposes a framework, so neither will count as hinges. Three levels, then, hinges occur within a framework, which is constituted by the rules. The rules presuppose more fundamental ideas, such as the stable existence of the pieces. It seems to me that somewhere, we must be moving from language games to practices, which I think are not linguistic but which can be described in language.
Surely this discussion fits better into this kind of interpretation.
OC 411. But in the entire system of our language-games it belongs to the foundations. The assumption, one might say, forms the basis of action, and therefore, naturally, of thought.
What belongs to the foundation of our language-games is not another language-game. It is what we know and what we believe that forms the system.
If we imagine the facts otherwise than as they are, certain language-games lose some of their importance, while others become important. And in this way there is an alteration - a gradual one -
in the use of the vocabulary of a language.
Language-games are about something. It is what they are about, the content of the game, that is important.
I really want to say that a language-game is only possible if one trusts something (I did not say
“can trust something”).
Trust is not a language-game. It is a condition for the possibility of language-games.
The system is not that of language. It is the system of knowledge. (OC 410)
And the concept of knowing is coupled with that of the language-game.
They are not the same. The one is not reducible to the other.
The claim that science is a type of language-game is just as wrong as the claim that cooking is a type of language-game. You may have to eat your words, but it is not words that are cooked. Cooking is a thing we do with food, not words.
I like to think of it this way. Hinges, language games and what is deemed to be true or false with a game are different dimensions or aspects of every experience of meaning we have when we engage with others. These dimensions tell us simultaneously about the relative stability of aspects of the same experience. When we take a truth-false test we are aware that the answer could be one way or another. At the same time we are implicitly aware that these options are possible variations within an overarching thematics, the subject matter of the test.
What is true or false is a variation within the stable theme of language game, and the movement from one language game to another is a variation within the thematics of a hinge. But the thematics implied by hinges and language games are never just locked in place. A rule can never dictate what to do next. To follow a rule involves creative improvisation. We have to actually make the next move in order to reveal what it meant to follow the rule, and to work within a hinge.
A community may treat language according to a thematics wherein language is a tool for representing a pre-existing real world. That doesn’t mean that their actual use of language is not a creative
enactment of meaning, it just means that from a Wittgenstein vantage their thinking of language in terms of such abstractions as ‘representing reality’ is a confused kind of enactment.
It seems to me that the complication here is that the reality that is represented in a language game is defined within the game. Which is not to say that there is not a language-independent reality related to each game. But the idea of a single cross-categorial Reality underpinning all language is hard to envision, let alone describe.
I don’t seem to understand what “enactment” means in this context. Can you explain a bit more?
I had in mind enaction as phenomenologically influenced enactivist philosophers and psychologists employ the term. To enact a world is not to represent it but to do things with it. The reality of world emerges in the patten of the doing (the grammar). Such patterns are both invented and discovered, so a grammar-independent reality would amount to a grammatical confusion.
