Friday, 8 March 2013

§120

Wittgenstein points to another misconception concerning meaning. People think of the meaning of a word as being something like the word - the same kind of thing as the word, but nonetheless different. -Similar to the relationship between the money and the cow one can buy with it (you could say money and cow are the same kind of thing - commodities - you can buy a certain number of cows for a certain amount of money) but the relationship is more like the relationship between money and what can be done with it (parallel to the word and the use of it).

Wittgenstein also makes the point that philosophy in the 'old style' - the philosophy of traditional philosophers and of referentialists like Russell, Frege and the younger Wittgenstein - cannot be done without using ordinary language. I suppose the point here is to oppose the idea that we should construct ideal languages - it's unavoidable that we will use ordinary language.

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