Episode #231 ... The Late Work of Wittgenstein - Language Games

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this. Patreon.com/philosophizethis. Philosophical writing on Substack at philosophize this on there as well. I hope you love the show today. So there's a tactic that's become pretty popular in what some people would call the debate space of the Internet these days. There's a trick someone will do, where at the very beginning of the conversation, they'll ask the other person to define the exact thing that they're gonna be talking about that day. Well, sound kinda like this. Just to start out today, can you please give me your definition of god? Can you give me a definition of abortion or insurrection or justice, whatever it is that day? And then the other person will usually take the bait. They try to give their take on it. Maybe they'll say an insurrection is when a group of people try to overthrow some form of authority out there. Then the other person will say back to that, well, based on your definition, is a prison riot an insurrection then? That's people overthrowing an authority. If a union fires a manager that's harassing employees, is that an insurrection? How about if my two kids both kick me in the shins at the exact same time? Is that an insurrection? I mean, if you can't even define what it is we're supposed to be talking about today, are you even qualified to be here? All the while, this person's usually winning points with the crowd that's watching the debate. I mean, if the other side can't get to the essence of what we're talking about, then what are we even talking about? This scene, actually, isn't too far away from something a lot of you will be familiar with from the history of philosophy. There's a guy that used to do something like this, although he did it in good faith and was trying to avoid rhetoric while he did it. His name was Socrates. Remember, he'd go out into the public square with people shopping and walking around, and he'd asked them to give him a definition of something like justice. When they gave him this definition, he'd rip it apart, point out all the limitations in it, point out how there's examples of justice that clearly fall outside of the rational protocol you've just set up there. Would you like to try again with another definition of justice, perhaps? And again, he did all this because he thought this was necessary to get closer to an understanding of the essences that must be at the root of all these things. But what if all this is not what it seems? What if this is not people misunderstanding definitions and trying to get to better ones, ones, but people playing two very different language games at the same time? In fact, what if most of the problems philosophers seem to have, puzzles that have stumped them for centuries when it comes to knowledge …