How playing Wittgensteinian language-games can set us free
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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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.