What is Postmodern Philosophy of Language? (Wittgenstein and Derrida)
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- Опубликовано: 25 июл 2024
- An explanation of the postmodern philosophy of language focusing specifically on the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida, including an explanation of Wittgenstein's language games and Derrida's deconstruction.
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Information for this video gathered from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Collier-MacMillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, and more! (#Postmodernism #Language)
What is said about Wittgenstein's later philosophy is only partially correct. It is true that according to Wittgenstein If we want to understand what we mean by 'understand', 'refer to', 'knowledge', 'free will' etc., we should try to observe and analyze how we use these words. However, 'language game' cannot be used interchangeably with 'context'. The examples given in the video are about context, not about language games. Therefore, the video does not truly represent what Wittgenstein's later philosophy is about.
Context refers to the surronding of a sentence that is needed to interpret what someone tries to convey with this sentence. For instance, the sentence "Tea is hot" can be used for different purposes. One could be complaining about tea being too hot, one might be delivering his satisfaction with temperature of tea or maybe one is measuring heat of tea and means that the temperature is above 100 celcius by "Tea is hot".
Try to explain what 'language game' means is more complex. A language game is like an ordinary game like chess. We play chess according to the certain rules such as "knight moves in L shape". Different games have different rules. It is meaningless to ask "how to checkmate" in football or "can the knight eat the bishop" in draughts. We also speak language according to the certain rules, for instance, we say "I am taller than you" but not "red is taller than green" since 'being tall' is a property that we can attribute to the objects with certain lengths, not a property of colors. Different language games have different rules. What determines these rules is how we use them in our life. In order to understand why 'language game' matters when we do philosophy, consider the following:
In the language game where we have objects, to talk about an object, we must be able to point out physically. If I say "Jack is ill", then somewhere must there be someone named 'Jack' or if I say "this apple is red", again I must be able to show "this apple". In this language game, these propositions are about objects with certain properties and in relations i.e. objects in a state of affairs.
However, this rule does not seem to be valid when we speak of mathematical propositions. It is said "5 is greater than 2" but we cannot show '5' or '2' with our fingers. This fact misleads some philosophers to think that numbers must exist in order for mathematical propositions to be meaningful since "5 is greater than 2" is true and has meaning, then the proposition must be about objects '5' and '2', and their relation 'being greater'.
What is wrong in this chain of thoughts is that it takes a rule in one language game and applies to all language games without justification. The rule "to talk about something, it must be referred to" belongs to the language game of objects, not to the language game of mathematical propositions, neither to the language game of experiences nor that of perception. We say we have pain but cannot show pain physically because it is not something to show. That pain is not something to be shown is not a metaphysical fact but a grammatical one.
Language games determine what is meaningful, which question can be asked or answered. As I said earlier,rules of language games are determined by our use so they are not concerete but can be changed or emerge as the time passes. This is especially clear in physics.
Just stumbled across this channel and loving it. Thanks for the videos and sharing your knowledge 😁
LETS GOO, I would love to see more continental philosophy.
also: good timing for this video, right when I needed it most
Glad to help! I am working on building my background in continental philosophy to be able to do more such videos.
Congrats!!!!!!! We love you carneades!!❤️
Thanks so much! I'm very excited to hit 100,000 subs! I'll have a special video this weekend, and hopefully a big announcement early next month. :)
u are a real g. Thank you.
Thanks for video, and thanks for the transcription that helps so much the foreign users as me. If you can, and if you will find some stuff in your language, i'd like to suggest you the Gianni Vattimo's idea of "weak thinking" (in italian, "pensiero debole"). It was very important in Italy during the debate about Postmodernism. Regards, see you soon
Thanks for this video.
Of course! Thanks for watching. :)
Henry Staten’s book on this is great.
Just began watching, I am enjoying the series. Concerning the last question; it appears to me that the issue is in fact serious, however the overwhelming majority of people work out solutions to the issue that are amenable to all embers of the conversation, and therefore it is maybe a serious issue that has been adequately resolved to a point where it is rank ordered low enough to no longer warrant consideration until far more important issues, such as getting people clean water and adequate food, are resolved.
I guess that the context combined with the knowledge of the common-used meanings give us the tools to REFER to some situation, thing or action; and then, all of us can understand the reality other people are trying to represent for us.
Words can have an objective meanings if we don't attach "objective" with "outside our minds". Objective is also "the truth depends on the object". And, since the truth is a relation between object and subject, the meaning is a construct of this both.
"He had it coming!" - a description of a dream. I caught your joke!
What would an "objective meaning" be, theoretically, if it existed? The only access we have to meaning is via subjective experience, there is no way to quantitatively measure the meaning of a word. The closest to an objective meaning would thus be intersubjectively shared semantic content, which IS what this video claims as existing in CONTRAST to objective meaning. We can argue whether the context-dependency of the meaning changes anything about its objectivity, but I think it's quite correct that mutatis mutandis, word meaning as measured secondarily (that is, by asking speakers) is reproducible. I don't think this would pass as a challenge to objective meaning in any other domain but that of postmodern philosophy. There's the idea of _non-constructed objective meaning_ of a word, which the context-dependency argument would soundly dismantle, but nobody has been advancing that since ancient Greece, so that's hardly what this 20th-century charge is going against.
Like the spoken word, the written word is also set in a context - the context of the writing act. The hearer uses, so to speak, the spoken word almost entirely as an item taken from memory, which is a sort of writing or recording in the mind or brain. The corrigibility of memory would seem to pose the same problem as we have with the written word in that both are removed in time and space from the context. But what of the language games, hierarchies, etc? Isn't one's access to the rules of a language game as fragile as his access to the origin point of the written or spoken word?
It seems that philosophers since Plato have placed the truth language game at the center of all language games. This is what Dridda is challenging.
Thank for the very useful video as always
Odd how this channel, with very limited production quality, very low audio quality, and very minimalistic visuals has managed to gain 100k subs. Absolutely mind-boggling.
Clearly it is a testament to how high quality the information is. :) I see so many educational channels that spend so much time on production quality that they are only able to produce a few videos a year, or end up getting the actual information wrong. My goal here is to focus on making the content correct, and covering as many topics as I can, not creating the snazziest looking videos. I also spend a lot of my life living and working in developing countries meaning that I need to be able to put videos together with minimal equipment or internet connection.
I cannot be 100% certain what langage game someone is playing - I don't think 100% certainty is possible anyway. But 99.9% certainty that some philosopher plays the 'truth' language game is sufficient to continue playing.
I don't agree with the pyrrhonic interpretation of Wittgenstein and Derrida. But I agree with the skeptical interpretation (= the last rebuttal for Wittgenstein and Derrida of your video).
I think langugage could get more subjective depending upon the topic and the amount of instinctuous axioms the argument contains.
I will agree with Derrida that there isn't an objective meaning to words. However, we can at times escape the chain of signifiers through ostensive definitions. The act of poiting to an object, saying a word, and hoping that the other understands what you are doing, if successful, defines a word without the use of other words. It can't be done for all words but we can do it with a lot of them. I also wonder how those philosophers that prefer the spoken to the written word on the basis that written things will likely survive past the author reacted to the invention of audio recordings 😀
Even pointing to a thing and saying a word has its issues. See Torpenhow Hill, or the Terry Pratchett quote below. Also they did react with concern, hence the technological tint to Baudrillard's Simulacra (ruclips.net/video/U4tyWKJUPPU/видео.html)
“The forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be called -- in the local language -- Your Finger You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the word Skund.
The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don't Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.
Rainclouds clustered around the bald heights of Mt. Oolskunrahod ('Who is this Fool who does Not Know what a Mountain is') and the Luggage settled itself more comfortably under a dripping tree, which tried unsuccessfully to strike up a conversation.”
Words are subjective, but data less so. We can measure the amount of water in a beaker. And while the units of measurement are arbitrary, the amount of water in the beaker is not.
Kane B (Popular Philosophy RUclipsr) got back to me and said he emailed you about a debate/discussion on Skepticism. So it seems like he will debate it and contacted you. I really hope that discussion happens, youtube is a pretty barren place when it comes to actual debates in defense of positions like pyrrhonian skepticism. Let me know if you guys are planning anything! Being a skeptic is pretty lonely sometimes in philosophy haha
Thanks for reminding me. I have been emailing back and forth with him a bit. I am hopeful that we can make something work, though due to my schedule constraints it probably won't be for a couple of months. Please make sure to bother me again in November if you haven't seen anything. Thanks for connecting us! :)
@@CarneadesOfCyrene Sure I'll remind you haha! I always wanted to ask you, have you ever had a mystical experience? I just ask this because, unlike people who use mystical experiences to justify some religious belief when I had one it sort of made skepticism so clear, it made me truly aware of just how insane claims of certainty are, I wasn't really partial to skepticism prior to it, but after it happened the "suspension of judgement" attitude felt right because it put into perspective just how tenuous perception is. It wasn't like a hallucination, it was a whole other order of magnitude of overturning normal experience. And it was kind of clear from that point forward that I didn't have firm ground to believe anything (positive or negative).
Hmm. I don't know about a mystical experience. I have had the experience of finding peace in skepticism. When things go bad, I take solace in the fact that I might wake up from a dream any minute. It is like that feeling just after you wake up from a nightmare and realize whatever happened isn't real. If the world looks bleak, there's not need to fear because it could all be an illusion.
Honestly, I've thought of Derrida as being outside of Post-modernism proper (he's a deconstructionist), and Wittgenstein as being phallogocentric (which, given my previous statement would have more to do with deconstruction than post-modernism proper).
As we have noted throughout the series, postmodernism is more a loose collection of movements and positions. I say we are moving into postmodernism proper more because we are moving into philosophy more with this video (while previous ones focused on postmodernism in other disciplines). Despite Derrida's protestations, I do think there are strong lines between his works and the general themes of postmodernism we discussed in the first video. For Wittgenstein, the very conception of language games seems a deeply postmodern framework, and several postmodernists claim to be using his work as a basis. Here's the SEP "Derrida and deconstruction are routinely associated with postmodernism, although like Deleuze and Foucault, he does not use the term and would resist affiliation with “-isms” of any sort. "
I suppose Derrida's theory of language does line up with incredulity towards metanarratives. Wittgenstein's late philosophy of language (based around language games, not the Tractautus) does seem to imply a incredulity towards metanarratives as well...I've heard this guy named Richard Rorty who writes in an analytic style, but calls himself a pragmatist and tries to "pragmatize" Derrida (I don't know what that entails...)...Wittgenstein is a weird writer...he's clearly an analytic and writes in an analytic style, but definitely is NOT a positivistic analytic philosopher (he's a logical atomist..."The world is not made of things, it is made of facts")...is logical atomism a metanarrative...I don't know...I do know some scholars of cultural theory have classified him as having more in common with the pragmatists and pragmatistic analyses of culture rather than post-structuralism or deconstruction. What do cultural theorists know though? The pragmaticist C.S. Pierce's concept of the phaneron sounds post-modern and maybe even deconstructionist...
Nice Magritte hack
A postmodern answer to your final questions: it depends.
Send this audio file to someone to clean it. It’s bad.
Among all those "unjustified" dichotomies Derrida speaks of, "truth/error" seems not to fit with the others, because while we may *associate* the others with a positive/negative dichotomy, truth and error *just are* a positive and negative dichotomy, like "positive/negative" itself: truth is correct speech or belief, error is incorrect (in speech or belief or otherwise); "correct/incorrect" are likewise nothing but a positive/negative dichotomy, as are "good/bad", "right/wrong", "approval/disapproval", "valorization/marginalization", etc.
Can you explain what "positive" and "negative" mean without referencing other dichotomies?
@@luisfdconti Not in words of course, because I would have to use other words to do the explaining. But just like in the Beetle-in-a-Box scenario, through the way "beetle" is used there it becomes clear that "beetle" means "thing in the box in this kind of scenario", rather than any *particular* thing anyone has in *their* box, so too through using such dichotomous words to *do* the act of approving/disapproving, valorizing/marginalizing, etc, it becomes clear that they mean those things. Where e.g. "masculine" and "feminine" both *refer* to specific patterns of phenomena, and to certain people might *imply* valorization or marginalization, things like "true" and "false", or "good" and "bad", *do* nothing besides valorize or marginalize.
The appeal to "family resemblance" as being in some cases the only way to account for the resemblance of items in a set or category by appealing to something other than shared individual properties seems wrong-headed. If the members of a family fail to have the same nose, the same mouth, etc. it is said the only thing that connects them as a category is this thing called family resemblance, which is not like other properties because it seems to be more like an indexical than a descriptive. Why is it not like other properties - because it is abstract? That doesn't set it apart. If you look at a photo of the extended Jones family, one thing you may notice is that each one has the property of Jones family resemblance, or to put it more precisely, each has the "this-family-resemblance", and why that is not just as good a property as any, I do not know. It would seem that an analysis of the nose, ears, mouth etc. would ultimately lead you to the same alleged dead-end.
Maybe I'm thinking too simple and what you mean extends beyond that, however as I understand it, family resemblances are different from shared properties in that they don't apply to every item in a given set. (A) might share a property with (B) and (B) might share a property with (C) but (C) might *not* share a property with (A). Still they are grouped into the same set since they are mutually connected in various ways.
@@CromCruachTheElderK I'm saying that if the members of the Jones family do indeed have a family resemblance, then they have a common property, namely, being Jones-looking.
@@cliffordhodge1449 Yeah but when you try to explain what it means to be Smith-looking, you cannot point to the properties they universally hold in common.
Sirius Lee!
Even given that language is a game, it can still be the case that games have rules and that some people break those rules when they try to play. That then raises the question of how games get their rules, but nothing says that question is without answer. My own answer is that games get their rules by unanimous agreement, either explicitly or through a history of uncontested use. When someone breaks with a pre-existing agreement, they're breaking the rules of that game, and it doesn't matter how many people break the rules of the game, that still doesn't change the rules. It's only if *everyone* agrees on the new rules that the rules actually change.
This applies both to the meaning of words, and to the ownership of property, if not to other things as well. Words mean what we all agree them to mean, things belong to whoever we all agree they belong to, and whoever then breaks with those agreements has broken a rule, and it's still breaking a rule no matter how many other people are also doing it, until you get unanimous agreement again.
YEET
I'm sorry but you cant throw around bold statements like 'words dont have an objective meaning based on what they refer to', and then give such a limp example as the beetle in a box. Your sole example was one in which people are actually playing a word-game where the word beetle means 'whatevers in my box'.
Is that actually your justification for claiming that words cant have an objective meaning based on what they refer to'?
That you can imagine a game where people use the word beetle to refer to different objects in different boxes?
What's even more baffling is that your thought experiment doesnt even support the claim you're making. In your own example, you defined the word beetle, based ON WHAT IT REFERS TO. It refers to whatever is in the box. Thats how you defined it.
I have a thought experiment for you. Imagine a world where people use the word beetle to refer to a black creepy-crawly.
First, let me say as a skeptic, I'm not convinced by any of the arguments here, and I do raise several objections at the end of the video.
Second, I do offer several other examples to the general claim that words do not have meaning outside of a language game (e.g. the "he had it coming" example). You may be taking the beetle thought experiment a bit too literally. The point is that if we all have a meaning of a given word in our heads (whether that is "beetle" or "red") that thing is our heads does not determine what the word means, our shared use of it does (i.e. if you were in my head but suddenly all the colors were reversed, it wouldn't be the case that I was right and you were wrong about what is red, but rather red would not mean what we have in our heads, it would simply be all the things that we call red by convention).
To offer you some more examples, if I say "comedians are almost always silly" what makes that objectively true? You might even try to argue it was analytically true, that being silly was simply part of being a comedian. But the question remains, does the word "silly" pick out the same property regardless of context? Silly has changed meaning over time, it originally meant "pious" or "holy" in the 1200s something comedians are generally not, and certainly are not by definition. The truth value of that statement depends on the language game you are playing when you say it. To avoid the temporal issue, what about the statement "my car has a trunk" or the statement "my car has a boot". Whether they are true or false depends on which language game you are playing (the British language game find the first false and the second true, while the American does the opposite). Neither statement is objectively true independent of context.
@@CarneadesOfCyrene
"does the word "silly" pick out the same property regardless of context? "
No. I agree with you there. There are many words and phrases that are context dependent. But the argument wasnt that SOME words are context dependent, but that ALL are. Even words whose sole meaning and definition is to refer to an object.
"that thing is our heads does not determine what the word means, our shared use of it does". Ok, but what if the 'shared use' of a word, is to use it to refer to an object.
You know, like any noun. Their entire purpose/meaning/use/definition is to refer to an object.
btw I appreicate the response. I'm not attacking your great video, just the overrated fluff of Wittgenstein, Derrida and others - Bold Claims, Bad Examples, and a whole lot of backpedalling.
Well, as somebody with a M.A. in linguistics, I'm at 4:45, I'll humbly say that it is utter garbage and I'd recommend everyone an intro to semantics and pragmatics.
Could you elaborate what you mean? If you are referring to them misrepresenting Wittgenstein, please explain how it is a misrepresentation. If you are referring to the ideas of Wittgenstein being garbage, then also demonstrate how! Neither one of these can be understood by an intro in semantics, since it would not be enough to understand Wittgenstein and therefore the watcher would fail to notice the garbage of either one of these concepts, if they are indeed as rubbish as you claim
Does Derrida apply his "logic" to his own texts? Why even try to write out his arguments if nobody can understand what he means accurately?
He was creating a new language game? (Or maybe you could read Salmon's biography of Derrida to find the answer!)
Dubbed by Kermit the frog.
THANK YOU for embarking on a nuanced objection to post-structuralist ideas by actually examining their merits and engaging them, instead of going the Jordan Peterson route of setting up a strawman of the view and then declaring it opposed to human civilization itself.
Thanks! Happy to do so. :) Postmodernism is challenging because it is so complicated and amorphous, so it is easy to strawman and dismiss if you don't understand it. I'm hopeful that I can both illuminate it here and provide some real objections that engage with the substance, not a strawman.
Sounds to me that Derrida and Wittgenstein are espousing the ultimate straw-man argument: a select set of words don't have consistent meaning under certain contexts, therefore no words can have consistent meaning and thus words cannot refer to objective reality !
I would argue that their arguments can apply to all words
It's actually even worse, they're saying all that, whilst claiming the words they are communicating with are in fact proving an objective fact about how objective facts don't exist.
Derrida: words can't mean things, therefore my words mean no words mean things
Modernist: you know that you implicitly broke your logic within your syllogism and created a paradox
Derrida: LALALALALA I can't understand you cause words don't mean anything
@@confusedarmchairphilosopher That's an awfully long bow, drawn on severely insufficient evidence. The evidence for the contrary is abundant.
@@paulcarter7445 read my comment
@@rileycardiff1583 I agree - it's a paradoxical rabbit hole - one that the first wave of Postmodernism fell down a few decades ago. The new woke guise is beginning to demonstrate the same propensity for rabbit holes.
"Context matters for meanings."
Duh.
--- Linguists
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. This grand insight of postmodernist philosophy is completely banal.
"Therefore there is no such thing as truth."
--- Postmodernists
"But that doesn't follow."
--- Everyone
[crickets]
--Postmodernists
@@royzlatanestevez9843 Well, they have to justify their wages somehow...
Can a kangaroo hold a quart?
The Orgy of Relativism wins again, let's all cringe-watch Rick & Morty.