In Norman Malcolm’s article “Language game (2)” which I have just read, I have found some quotes from the ‘Zettel’* that would seem to back up a large part of my interpretation. I was showing that the language-game doesn’t, from what Wittgenstein tells us, seem much like a ‘complete language’. However, we could imagine a situation in which we would call it a language. This derives from the ‘pre-linguistic behaviour’ that forms the background of understanding and which is similar in many ways to our behaviour when we ‘understand’. This much we can get from the quotes below. I may have gone beyond that in saying understanding itself is non-linguistic (and not just the background to understanding) and/or that what is understood/ grasped is non-linguistic. I’ll talk more about that another time.
The following is the main one that caught my eye:
(On language game no.2) ‘You are just tacitly assuming that these people think; that they are like people as we know them in that respect; that they do not carry on that language game merely mechanically. For if you imagined them doing that, you yourself would not call it the use of rudimentary language’.
What am I to reply to this? Of course it is true that the life of those human beings must be like ours in many respects, and I said nothing about this similarity. But the important thing is that their language, and their thinking too, may be rudimentary, that there is such a thing as ‘primitive thinking’ which is described via primitive behaviour. The surrounding are not the ‘thinking accompaniment’ of speech.
“I said nothing about this similarity”. Malcolm: “In language game (2) there is nothing that excludes the possibility that those people will sometimes whistle or hum while they work, or nod at one another in good humour, or occasionally make cheerful dancing movements as they come or go”. Once we consider this similarity (which he said nothing about) there is no requirement that ‘we picture them as behaving stolidly or mechanically’. Presumably there is no requirement the other way either, just that we could describe it as a complete language.
One could describe the situation without reference to ‘meaning’ or ‘language’ at all. One might consider the situation as a scientific phenomenon. The only reason we would consider them as thinking is because their behaviour shares certain similarities with ours when we are said to be thinking. In my post I didn’t really mention thinking as such (or any particular assumptions about thinking), but concerned with intentionality in whatever guise that comes. However, the point was similar, that we would only consider it a linguistic phenomenon because of its relationship to our life and language.
“is such a thing as ‘primitive thinking’ which is to be described via primitive behaviour” Here thinking, in my post understanding, is to be described via or in relation to non-linguistic behaviour. It is only via something that is not part of the thought itself (or part of what is understood) that we could say that they are thinking or understanding at all. By noting this behaviour, into which language is woven, can we say the intentional concepts apply (even if primitively)
'The surroundings are not the ‘thinking accompaniment’ of speech'. The surroundings do not accompany the words showing that they are ‘thought’, ‘understood’, ‘meant’. There is nothing super-added to the thought or sentence that makes it any more the ‘secure’ that this or that situation is what the thought is of.
These I just added to make clearer what I had said previously. There were some other ideas that were potentially more controversial (or at least unconventional-sounding) that I slipped. Those, however are for another time.
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*As will be already clear from my previous posts, I am not yet overly conversant on books aside from the Tractatus, Philsoophical Grammar and Philosophical Investigations. Whilst I have skimmed many of the others (e.g. Notebooks, Remarks on Philosophy of Psychology etc) it is sometimes hard to know what to concentrate from, as they all appear to the uninitiated like me, rather ‘samey’. It is only now that I am starting this blog, and putting forward arguments, that the dis/continuities and the original context seem more relevant. As such, if there are relevant bits from other books that I don’t mention, please inform me and excuse my ignorance
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