
How playing Wittgensteinian language-games can set us free - jonbaer
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-playing-wittgensteinian-language-games-can-set-us-free
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RichardHeart
I don't like article titles in the form "X idea I just read about can set us
free." If a thing has a benefit, tell me what it is, do not bs me about my
freedom. Perhaps Understanding that words mean different things to different
people, and a context and inflection which can be optimized is far from
freedom. That sentence could be mined for a better title. Or any of the other
proposed benefits would do better as well as a title.

I don't like the presupposition that I'm not free. I also don't like the idea
that employing a small subsection of Wittgenstein's philosophy would free me
if I needed it.

I think Shakespeare did much more for language that Wittgenstein. The artful
and tactful use of language preceded Wittgenstein calling a subset of that
tact "language games"

I think "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" if far better than
Wittgenstein's Duck/Rabbit photo. Particularly if you're talking about words
and not visual perception. You could say that the lessons are slightly
different, logically, but I think it shows the power of artful language
locking a powerful idea into culture for hundreds of years.

It seems to me that Marcuse, Wittgenstein, and Sandy Grant Could learn some
things from the people who use language best. This is the final sentence of
this piece: "We might first need to ‘be stupid’ if we are to see this."

Beautiful prose best delivers beautiful philosophy.

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SomeStupidPoint
The ideas aren't "slightly different, logically" \-- they're nearly
diametrically opposed!

Shakespeare is commenting that the essence of the thing is _not_ connected to
the social construction of its label, while Wittgenstein is contending that
they're exactly that -- that a rose smells the same regardless of the
construct of language employed to address it versus an image that appears to
be a facsimile of different animals depending on how you address it; that
Romeo has an ineffable quality that will remain sans familial ties and social
perception versus the notion that Romeo is only who he is because of the
social construct of "Romeo" everyone else holds.

At heart, they're opposing views on the notion that syntax is semantics.

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RichardHeart
Shakespeare's reference is often used to imply that the names of things do not
affect what they really are. -wikipedia

rabbit-duck image: "In addition to ambiguous sentences, Wittgenstein discussed
figures that can be seen and understood in two different ways. Often one can
see something in a straightforward way — seeing that it is a rabbit, perhaps.
But, at other times, one notices a particular aspect — seeing it as something.
An example Wittgenstein uses is the "duckrabbit", an ambiguous image that can
be seen as either a duck or a rabbit.[32] When one looks at the duck-rabbit
and sees a rabbit, one is not interpreting the picture as a rabbit, but rather
reporting what one sees. One just sees the picture as a rabbit. But what
occurs when one sees it first as a duck, then as a rabbit? As the gnomic
remarks in the Investigations indicate, Wittgenstein isn't sure. However, he
is sure that it could not be the case that the external world stays the same
while an 'internal' cognitive change takes place."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations#S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations#Seeing_that_vs._seeing_as)

Shakespeare states that things are the same no matter what you call them.
Wittgenstein states that things are what they are regardless of what you call
them. A duck-rabbit is a duck-rabbit whether you choose to call it a duck or a
rabbit. Their statements seem more similar than different to me.

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Tomminn
Reading "philosophical investigations" slowly over one summer is something I'm
really glad I did. Wittgenstein is an open-eyed, careful, insightful dude who
somewhat necessarily speaks in cryptic parables.

If you sit with a paragraph of what he said for an afternoon, by the end of
the book you have will have a perspective that allows you to avoid a lot of
the basic flawed assumptions our species tends to make when we think
abstractly. This is pretty valuable.

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mannykannot
It is not unusual to see discussions devolve into arguments over the meanings
of words, as if the issues being debated could be definitively settled in
favor of the side more felicitous to the 'true' meaning of the terms used in
the discussion ('socialism' and 'freedom' are common examples of words
triggering this sort of thing.)

The careful use of terminology is important in technical fields, and learning
the terminology is an important step in mastering a field of knowledge, but it
is not the final step in so doing. When the complex trade-offs of society are
concerned, undue emphasis on the primacy of the true meaning of terms tends to
lead to dogma.

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Booktrope
So this makes me wonder, why would anyone bother to write about Marcuse's
critique of Wittgenstein. Don't tell me our armchair radical academics are
once more so enamored of facile concepts like "repressive tolerance" that
Marcuse is again being taken seriously! The Philosophical Investigations is
crucial is you want to think seriously about how language works, and to use
it. Marcuse on the other hand offers what Orwell so incisively called a
"smelly little ideology".

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wodenokoto
Half way through the article, and the author has still not attempted to
explain what the language-game is, how to play it or what it can set us free
from.

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mannykannot
It does not get much better by the end, and it is even worse in laying out
Marcuse's objections.

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grenoire
What the heck is a 'manel?'

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RichardHeart
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manel_(term)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manel_\(term\))

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DashRattlesnake
A Tumblrism gets a wikipedia page?

