Philisophical investigations

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1. nph278Oct 2024
   Christianson and Chater's "The Language Game". This book changed the way I viewed everything, and also led me to read "The Philisophical Investigations", which I would also put up there.
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2. ctwSep 2021
   I read the first 100 pages or so of Philisophical Investigations before giving up since I had lost track of the lines of reasoning. Here's what I got out of what I did read though:

   Language is far more important in philosophy and life than we think. The biggest takeaway I got from the part of this book I read is a way of looking at problems with the limitations of language in mind. Ask yourself: to what extent is thinking speaking? What is thinking without language? Is it even possible, or is that something else?

   There's this interesting idea that has stuck with me, which is that when we say words, "pictures" are "brought before" our mind. Is language (speaking, reading/writing) simply a way for us to conjure up these mental images in other people's minds? If so, how can we be sure that what they see is what we intended for them to see? I think it's clear from experience that the images are mostly right, most of the time. But when they're not, we have misunderstandings. Another interesting statement made in the book (iirc) is that we only need more language when we feel there is a misunderstanding. The word "more" is important in the previous sentence. The idea here is that when we speak, we have some desired outcome from the outset. Once we feel that our speaking has led to the outcome we wanted, we are satisfied to stop speaking. It is only when the person we're speaking to isn't doing what we want, or seems to be getting the wrong mental picture that we need to continue speaking (this is what I meant by "more language": to continue speaking).

   There's another interesting area Wittgenstein explores (which I can't admit to following very well), but I'll try to conjure a mental image in your head of it ;). Basically, so far his argument (if I understood correctly) is that "the truth" is the mental images we see and the actions we take, and language is just a means to those ends. He then argues (again, if I understood him correctly) that we usually run into trouble when we take language as the starting point of knowledge. That's not very clear, so what do I mean by that? It's sort of like, words work well when we're using them to achieve some outcome. But they start to confuse us when we use them without a desired outcome from the outset: when we use them to gain knowledge. Words are not facts that we can logically make deductions from to discover new knowledge.

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3. zwkrtMar 2021
   Well your scenario is obviously playing out to be true, this doesn’t mean that we need to degrade privacy on all fronts. It’s reasonable to me that someone might have to disclose that they have a communicable disease yet still have privacy in the vast majority of areas of their life. Heck, before the pandemic this was already the case; you can be prosecuted in many countries for the intentional (or intentionally undisclosed) transmission of HIV.

   Talk about privacy reminds me of Wittgenstein’s Philisophical Investigations, in which he expounds that we get into so much conceptual trouble when we try to use words like “truth” in the abstract instead of looking at cases where people actually say that word. Privacy is not a single right or a single action, it is an umbrella term for hundreds of unrelated things. Privacy means totally different things in the following scenarios:

   - at the doctors office - at a nude beach - in a changing room - between neighbors - among parents and children - a “private person” (i.e. someone who doesn’t share their thoughts readily) - private enterprise

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