Saturday, 2 March 2013

§108

When we do look closely at ordinary language use and at the way in which the concepts 'proposition' and 'language' are employed we see that there is a 'family' of different things. When we see this logic seems to lose its rigour (since logic deals in looking at inferential relations between propositions) and so logic seems to dissolve away. But how can logic lose its rigour?

What we have to do instead of thinking of the discovery of crystalline purity as our end we must turn the investigation around 'on the pivot of our real need' (clarity about the employment of the relevant concepts).

Wittgenstein again uses the analogy of chess. A word is like a piece in chess in that both can be conceived as spatial/temporal phenomena. But words are also rule-governed and employed in a variety of games - just as chess pieces are employed in a rule-governed game.

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