Hello sorry for the late post but it was thanksgiving and I wanted to spend most of the time with my family. I hope everyone else had as good of a thanksgiving as I did but I digress; on last Monday one of the modern philosophers we talked about was Wittgenstein. He believed that the role of the philosopher was to clarify language and words. Also that words do not just name things one example of this was when I was walking to my car Monday, yes I remembered all this time. I traveled through the BAS courtyard when it started to sleet and one lady talking on her phone said "oh my god its hailing" to which me and three other people corrected. This little anecdote has meaning other than don't call partially frozen rain hail, while me and the three others called the precipitation sleet and the phone lady named it hail it could be said that sleet is a type of hail. This is what Wittgenstein was talking about that any language has over lapping words that can cause confusion like good, okay, fine, etc..
I'm lee Gish and those were my thoughts.
Language is certainly a complex subject, and though I'd never though about it before, its well-suited to philosophy. It's easy to say words mean what the dictionary says they do, but someone did write that dictionary to begin with. Words are meaningless without the meaning that we give them as a society.
ReplyDeleteAlso with language in our culture and the different groups within a culture can put different meanings to our words. Within one group the definition of a certain term is simple and interchangeable with a few other words, within a different group those same words are very different from each other and are not interchangeable. Such as being in a sociology class or an art class, they put certain definitions to words you would think are ordinary relative terms.
DeleteFQ- When did Philippa Foot die? (2010)
ReplyDeleteDQ- Who would you save in the pick one or 5 situation?
Comment- Sounds like a good class sorry that I missed it
Link- This is a widely known situation that a lot of people question what they would do?
(16-2) I was very interested in Wittgenstein; our ideas can often only be expressed using language, and there aren't simple synonyms for each word in language. To an extent, we are confined by langauge and must be able to use it well in order to effectively present our ideas to each other.
ReplyDeleteI never thought about words being meaningless until now. Someone did write the dictionary, so where did he/she get the words and the meanings from? It could've been the author's own personal meanings off the words and therefore totally subjective.
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