§15
The word 'signify' is most at home where a name is used to mark an object.
You could imagine a situation in which someone gives out a label to someone else and the second person brings the tool with that mark on it.
Why does Wittgenstein say that 'when philosophizing, it will often prove useful to say to ourselves: naming something is rather like attaching a name tag to a thing?'
I'm not totally sure what Wittgenstein has in mind here. When I think about situations in which name-tags are attached to things I think about cases like (i) labelling children's belongings (ii) labelling food/drink in shared student houses.
Given that Wittgenstein thinks it is worthwhile to focus on the use of words it might be worth thinking about the use of the labels in these situations.
A school child might have their pencil-case labelled. This enables the child to be sure which pencil-case is their own - other students might have similar pencil-cases. So the label is used in identifying the pencil-case.
It could also be used, if the pencil-case goes missing, to return the pencil-case to the child.The person who finds the pencil case can return the pencil-case to the child without knowing anything about that child - they could just call out the child's name and when the child responds they can give the pencil-case with their name on it to them.
In terms of thinking about this in philosophical terms I notice I'm using terms like 'identifying' and 'knowledge' - the kinds of things that philosophers are interested in. What 'philosophical' point could these observations be used to make? - Perhaps that names don't function as disguised definite descriptions (the person returning the pencil-case to the child need not know that any description is true of them).
Rob, you wrote, "Why does Wittgenstein say that 'when philosophizing, it will often prove useful to say to ourselves: naming something is rather like attaching a name tag to a thing?'"
ReplyDeleteI've often thought that the point is to show in a rather physical way how little is done when naming something. Or better: without a use for the label/tag it isn't even that. The upshot being that we might be tempted to think that attaching a tag to something is sufficient for doing something meaningful, just as we might think that saying NN while pointing at something is sufficient for doing something meaningful. But in neither case is the tagging or pointing meaningful outside a context of tagging/ostensively explaining/defining something, a context of use.
I think your example of labelling a pencil-case brings out the difference from Russell's 'definite descriptions' theory really well. To attach a nametag to something, you don't need to know anything about that thing, and to use the name you find on the tag correctly, you don't need to know anything about the meaning of the name or the properties of the thing. Kripke talks about this, I think - how you might use the name Einstein correctly even though the only thing you believe about Einstein is false.
ReplyDeleteOne thing confuses me about Wittgenstein's example, though - I mean the fact that 'attaching a nametag to a thing' is a simple physical thing to do, whereas the puzzle that Russell tries to deal with is how names are attached to things. How do we attach a name to something? Is it like Kripke's 'baptism'?
And what about names whose object doesn't exist, like Hamlet or Santa Claus - does Wittgenstein's remark help at all with these cases?
George - your point is made by Wittgenstein in §26 ("One can call this [naming] a preparation for the use of a word. But what is it a preparation for?"). He doesn't make this point explicitly in §15 but I suppose you could say that it is implicit. - Wittgenstein does give an example of a label being put to use in an activity (A showing the assistant a mark and the assistant bringing the tool that has the mark on it). - So this would be a case where the word/label is employed in a language game.
ReplyDelete...And my pencil-case/milk cases would be other cases where the labels have a use. Does that mean that they have a meaning? - Proper names are a bit of an unusual case, perhaps. I might label my milk 'Rob' - and there is a use for the label here - but 'Rob' isn't something that you might look up in a dictionary and expect to find a synonym or an explanation of meaning.