§1
Wittgenstein presents the Augustinian picture of the essence of human language in §1. This is something he wants to criticise. He raises the case of the shopkeeper with the slip of paper marked 'five red apples'.
How can this case be used to think about problems with the Augustinian picture?
- One problem that springs to mind is that you cannot point to the number five but according to Augustine we learn language by observing others pointing to things.
- In pointing at an object, like an apple, and saying 'five' you are pointing at the very same thing you might point to and say 'apple' or 'red'. How is an observer to know what it is that you are pointing to? - It seems that there isn't a particular way of pointing to or gazing at 'five', and there isn't a particular way of gazing at red as opposed to gazing at an apple.
Questions:
It may be that there are problems with learning an expression through observing somebody pointing once at an object and producing an utterance but could someone perhaps pick up the use of a word by observing a series of such gestures?
For example - somebody might point at a series of apples in turn and say 'one, two, three, four, five' - and do the same sort of thing with other objects. Could somebody learn to count by observing behaviour like this?
Or somebody might point at a series of red objects and say 'red' in each case. And point at other (blue) objects and say 'blue'. Could somebody acquire colour words in this way?
Does Wittgenstein want to rule out the possibility of starting to learn a language by observing gazes/pointing combined with utterances? How else could you learn?
I wonder if one way the example helps us get past the Augustinian picture is like this. If you ask me what the meaning of 'five' is, and expect some kind of answer about what it refers to, I might instead tell you about how we use it - e.g. a story about counting apples. If this is the only way we use the word, then there doesn't seem to be anything left to explain about 'five', and so the question about what it refers to loses its force. Maybe this brings out how not all words work by referring. (Though there might be problems when we consider statements like '5 plus 6 is 11'.)
ReplyDelete-Manish
I agree with the first bit of what you say but I'm confused by the 5 + 6 example.
ReplyDeleteJust that in "5 plus 6 is 11" we have a usage of 5 which is more name-like than in "here are 5 apples". In the 5 + 6 sentence, it seems more natural to ask what 5 is referring to than it does when 5 is merely used to count other objects. So an account of 5 which merely talked about its use in counting would be an incomplete account.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure it is any more 'name-like' although I think you could say it is being used differently there. What is being named in this case do you think?
ReplyDelete