Monday, 4 February 2013

§20

Is Wittgenstein making the point that 'meaning' is not a mental process accompanying your words here?

Someone might say 'bring me a slab' thinking of it as four words, whereas someone else might say 'bringmeaslab' thinking of it as one word.
The person who thinks of it as four words doesn't, as they say it, have all of it's combinatorial possibilities before their mind.

Wittgenstein:
"In Russian one says 'stone red' instead of 'the stone is red'. Does the sense they grasp lack the copula? Or do they add the copula in thought?"

I'm not sure what Wittgenstein is getting at here. Presumably the 'is' isn't present in a Russians thought - just as it isn't present in their spoken language.  - but they aren't lacking anything.

Is this making some kind of a point about there not being a 'language of thought'. Part of the Augustinian picture was that babies have thoughts but just don't have the means to express them. - Is this passage meant as an attack on that idea?

1 comment:

  1. I was confused by that last part too, but I think you're right that there's some criticism of the idea of a language of thought - related to the earlier idea that, in addition to what someone says, there's a 'way they thought it' too. As if, while saying a sentence, you're also saying it in your mind, and the mental sentence has some grammatical form.

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