§33
Someone might argue, in response to what Wittgenstein has been saying in the past few paragraphs, that somebody could interpret an ostensive explanation without having mastered the relevant language game - by guessing. Wittgenstein points out that there is no particular way of gazing at or pointing at a colour as opposed to the shape of an object. So if you're pointing at a red triangular-shaped thing you could be pointing at it intending for the person to understand that the word 'red' refers to things of this colour or that the word 'triangle' refers to things of this shape.
Wittgenstein points out that it sounds odd to ask someone to point at the number of a piece of paper. - This presumably indicates something about the role/use of number expressions as opposed to colour words or shape words (or other kinds of word).
Wittgenstein again uses a chess analogy. He says that making a move in chess "doesn't consist only in pushing a piece from here to there on the board - nor yet in the thoughts and feelings that accompany the move: but in the circumstances that we call 'playing a game of chess', 'solving a chess problem', and the like."
It might be worth spelling out here how this translates into talking about language. - Presumably Wittgenstein wants to claim that making a move in a language game (which might involve uttering a word or several words in combination) doesn't just consist in the utterance of the words or in the thoughts and feelings that accompany the words (your thoughts don't imbue the words with meaning): but in the circumstances that we call "asking for something's name", "giving and responding to orders" etc. etc. - Our utterances are embedded in rule-governed practices - just as one can be said to have made a move in chess only in the context of a rule-governed practice - a game of chess.
So do you see the argument of the past few sections roughly like this?
ReplyDeleteA: the way we learn a first language is by having the names of objects ostensively defined/explained for us.
B: this can't be the (only) way we learn, because to understand an ostensive definition of a name you already need to get how they work - you need to know the role that the word will play. That is, giving and understanding explanations of names is something we do within the language-game of naming, not a totally pre-linguistic act.
A: no, you don't need to have mastered any language-game; you only need to know what the person giving the explanation is pointing at - the colour or the shape or size or whatever.
B: pointing at the colour, the shape, etc. are also things we do within a language-game. There might be various physical or mental accompaniments, but the question of what you were pointing at is not to be answered by (1) investigating your physical gestures or (2) finding out what was going on in your head.
This can be seen by the variety of contexts in which we would say that someone is pointing at or paying attention to the colour. There's no set of physical gestures or mental processes which occur in all these contexts.
That sounds about right to me.
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