David Suchoff Family Resemblances: Ludwig Wittgenstein As a Jewish Philosopher the Admonition to Silence with Which Wittgenstein
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Can Family Resemblance Determine a Concept?
Sonia Micu Can Family Resemblance Determine a Concept? What is known as the history of concepts is really a history either of our knowledge of concepts or of the meanings of words. Often it is only after immense intellectual effort, which may have continued over centuries, that humanity at last succeeds in achieving knowledge of a concept in its pure form, in stripping off the irrelevant accretions which veil it from the eyes of the mind1. – Gottlob Frege Abstract This short essay analyses the notion of ‘family resemblance’ and investigates its ability to determine a concept. I explore the topic starting from Frege’s definition of a concept and I imagine possible criticism of the shortcomings brought by the lack of boundaries of this notion. I argue against such an objection and I try to show how a concept can be determined through family resemblance. Introduction In his exploration of the essence of language, Wittgenstein introduced the idea of a web of resemblances that would explain how certain objects are connected through overlapping similarities, rather than through one common feature. The notion of ‘family resemblance’ has created controversy ever since it was introduction in Philosophical Investigations (1953). The main criticism brought to the idea has been its lack of boundaries and the way it prevents this notion from determining a concept. In what follows, I will try to show that failing to determine a sharply defined concept does not make family resemblance incapable of determining a concept altogether. I will start by describing the notion of ‘family resemblance’ and the context which led to its introduction. -
Fertility and Modernity*
Fertility and Modernity Enrico Spolaore Romain Wacziarg Tufts University and NBER UCLA and NBER May 2021 Abstract We investigate the determinants of the fertility decline in Europe from 1830 to 1970 using a newly constructed dataset of linguistic distances between European regions. We …nd that the fertility decline resulted from a gradual di¤usion of new fertility behavior from French-speaking regions to the rest of Europe. We observe that societies with higher education, lower infant mortality, higher urbanization, and higher population density had lower levels of fertility during the 19th and early 20th century. However, the fertility decline took place earlier and was initially larger in communities that were culturally closer to the French, while the fertility transition spread only later to societies that were more distant from the cultural frontier. This is consistent with a process of social in‡uence, whereby societies that were linguistically and culturally closer to the French faced lower barriers to learning new information and adopting new behavior and attitudes regarding fertility control. Spolaore: Department of Economics, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155-6722, [email protected]. Wacziarg: UCLA Anderson School of Management, 110 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles CA 90095, [email protected]. We thank Quamrul Ashraf, Guillaume Blanc, John Brown, Matteo Cervellati, David De La Croix, Gilles Duranton, Alan Fernihough, Raphael Franck, Oded Galor, Raphael Godefroy, Michael Huberman, Yannis Ioannides, Noel Johnson, David Le Bris, Monica Martinez-Bravo, Jacques Melitz, Deborah Menegotto, Omer Moav, Luigi Pascali, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Nico Voigtländer, Joachim Voth, Susan Watkins, David Yanagizawa-Drott as well as participants at numerous seminars and conferences for useful comments. -
The Anti-Essentialism Paper
The New Pragmatism, Anti-essentialism, and What is Universal: It’s The Situation All The Way Down C. F. Abel Stephen F. Austin State University [email protected] The New Pragmatism, Anti-essentialism, and What is Universal: It’s The Situation All The Way Down C. F. Abel Stephen F. Austin State University [email protected] A well-known scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!" Introduction “New Pragmatism” attacks the very foundation of pragmatic thought by denying that we may ever have any definitive experience. As what we are experiencing is up for grabs, we can never know any situation that we may encounter, and we are left to ground both our knowledge and our values in our language games alone. This paper argues that this set of claims is founded on two errors, one regarding the nature of language games and the other regarding the nature of deconstruction. The “Old Pragmatism,” by way of contrast, is non-essentialist but not anti- essentialist, and it resolves the problem of how we might know “the situation,” given the subjectivity of our observations and the contingencies of our language games, by suggesting that our experiences can be understood as existing in, and constituted by, the totality of their particular instances or modes at the time of inquiry. -
Dialogical Grammar: Varieties of Dialogue in Wittgenstein's
ISSN: 2325-3290 (online) Dialogical Grammar: Varieties of Dialogue in Wittgenstein’s Methodology Dorit Lemberger Bar-Ilan university Abstract The dialogical character of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations has received scant attention in the literature, given the work’s status in his total oeuvre, and is dismissed as a marginal as compared to the other differences between the Tractatus and the Investigations. The main lines of interpretation that have been proposed see dialogue as a rhetorical technique intended to present erroneous positions and then refute them, as an exemplification of what can be expressed in language (McGinn 1997; Rhees 1998), or as a reflection of Wittgenstein’s informal teaching method (Malcolm 2001; Savickey et al. 1990). The present article adopts the perspective that Wittgenstein’s use of dialogue makes it possible to track the various modes of language-acts, consonant with his directions to examine the daily use of language (Wittgenstein 2009, §116 and esp. §132), “when language is, as it were, idling.” In his later inquiries, Wittgenstein frequently considers the nature of mental states, accompanied by an attempt to characterize the differences between them while at the same time dealing with the cases in which it is difficult to distinguish them. In this process he made a variety of uses of dialogue, each of which embodies a different aspect of language action. Subsequently I will demonstrate that these different uses are not haphazard. A scrutiny of the nature of the dialogue can help us understand the nature of the activity carried out of the state of consciousness. Finally, I propose a distinction among three main types of dialogue: technical, conversational, and reflexive. -
Family Resemblances and the Structure of Spatial Relationships
Corela Cognition, représentation, langage 3-2 | 2005 Vol. 3, n° 2 Family resemblances and the structure of spatial relationships Claude Vandeloise Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/corela/514 DOI: 10.4000/corela.514 ISSN: 1638-573X Publisher Cercle linguistique du Centre et de l'Ouest - CerLICO Electronic reference Claude Vandeloise, « Family resemblances and the structure of spatial relationships », Corela [Online], 3-2 | 2005, Online since 27 December 2005, connection on 19 April 2019. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/corela/514 ; DOI : 10.4000/corela.514 This text was automatically generated on 19 April 2019. Corela – cognition, représentation, langage est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d’Utilisation Commerciale - Partage dans les Mêmes Conditions 4.0 International. Family resemblances and the structure of spatial relationships 1 Family resemblances and the structure of spatial relationships Claude Vandeloise 1 The notion of family resemblance features or traits was first introduced by Wittgenstein (1953) with the category game. According to the more extreme interpretation of family resemblances, no member in a family possesses all the traits shared by the members of the family and no trait of the family is shared by all the members. As a consequence, two members in a family resemblance category do not have to share a single trait in order to be in the same category. This structure is represented in figure 1, in which the circles represent the extensions of the members of a family resemblance category satisfying a trait (a), a trait (b) and a trait (c) respectively: Figure 1 Figure 2 Corela, 3-2 | 2005 Family resemblances and the structure of spatial relationships 2 2 This extremely loose structure would fit perfectly Wittgenstein's intention since the philosopher wanted to demonstrate that a word is not explained by a further mysterious entity called meaning but is directly justified by its use in language-games. -
Unsupervised and Phonologically Controlled Interpolation of Austrian German Language Varieties for Speech Synthesis
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Speech Communication 72 (2015) 176–193 www.elsevier.com/locate/specom Unsupervised and phonologically controlled interpolation of Austrian German language varieties for speech synthesis Markus Toman a,⇑, Michael Pucher a, Sylvia Moosmu¨ller b, Dietmar Schabus a a Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (FTW), Donau-City-Str 1, 3rd floor, 1220 Vienna, Austria b Austrian Academy of Sciences – Acoustics Research Institute (ARI), Wohllebengasse 12-14, 1st Floor, 1040 Vienna, Austria Received 10 December 2014; received in revised form 18 May 2015; accepted 4 June 2015 Available online 12 June 2015 Abstract This paper presents an unsupervised method that allows for gradual interpolation between language varieties in statistical parametric speech synthesis using Hidden Semi-Markov Models (HSMMs). We apply dynamic time warping using Kullback–Leibler divergence on two sequences of HSMM states to find adequate interpolation partners. The method operates on state sequences with explicit durations and also on expanded state sequences where each state corresponds to one feature frame. In an intelligibility and dialect rating subjective evaluation of synthesized test sentences, we show that our method can generate intermediate varieties for three Austrian dialects (Viennese, Innervillgraten, Bad Goisern). We also provide an extensive phonetic analysis of the interpolated samples. The analysis includes input-switch rules, which cover historically different phonological developments of the dialects versus the standard language; and phonological processes, which are phonetically motivated, gradual, and common to all varieties. We present an extended method which linearly interpolates phonological processes but uses a step function for input-switch rules. Our evaluation shows that the integra- tion of this kind of phonological knowledge improves dialect authenticity judgment of the synthesized speech, as performed by dialect speakers. -
6 X 10.5 Long Title.P65
Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-83843-6 - Seeing Wittgenstein Anew Edited by William Day and Victor J. Krebs Excerpt More information Introduction Seeing Aspects in Wittgenstein William Day and Victor J. Krebs To see and describe aspects in Wittgenstein (aspects of insight, of perspicuity, of profundity, etc.) is what any discussion of his writings, and in particular of the enigmatic Philosophical Investigations, attempts to do. It would be a cute pun, but a sad excuse for a book, if this vol- ume of new essays offered simply the promise of “seeing” and describ- ing “aspects” in Wittgenstein’s discussion of aspect-seeing. Having invited and then discussed the essays in the present volume with our contributors over a handful of years, we find that they offer more than that simple promise. At a minimum, they bring out a range of connections between Parts I and II of the Investigations that should interest Wittgensteinian scholars whose central concerns would oth- erwise seem untouched by the discussions of aspect-seeing in the Investigations and elsewhere. More than occasionally these essays open up novel paths across familiar fields of thought to anyone for whom, for example, the objectivity of interpretation, the fixity of the past, the acquisition of language, or the nature of human consciousness remain live issues. But a recurring discovery in the chapters that fol- low is that there is something to be found in his remarks on aspect- seeing that is crucial to, yet all but overlooked in, the reception of the later Wittgenstein. And since the fate of the reception of the later Wittgenstein remains tied to one’s reading of the Investigations, however broadened by the publication of subsequent volumes of his later writings, it matters that these essays also have something to con- tribute to that perennial, and perhaps most pressing, question in 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-83843-6 - Seeing Wittgenstein Anew Edited by William Day and Victor J. -
The History of Russell's Pythagorean Mysticism
Reviews 175 THE HISTORY OF RUSSELeS PYTHAGOREAN MYSTICISM STEFAN ANDERSSON Theology and Religious Studies I University of Lund 5-223 62, Lund, Sweden [email protected] Ray Monk. Russell: Mathematics: Dreams and Nightmares. (The Great Philos ophers.) London: Phoenix, 1997. Paperbound. Pp. vi, 58. £2.00. CDN$4·99· ay Monk's short book on Russell is number seven in a series of books R called The Great Philosophers. Since there is neither a publisher's fore word nor an author's preface, the only suggestion concerning the content is the subtitle Mathematics: Dreams and Nightmares. For those familiar with Monk's earlier work on Wittgenstein and Russell and his understanding of the relationship between them, it will corne as no surprise that Monk has chosen this theme for his little book. His essay has two parts: 'The Pythagorean Dream" and "The Mathema tician's Nightmare". In the first part Monk describes the content, origin, and development of the Pythagorean dream up to Russell's discovery of his para dox. The second part is devoted to showing how the dream turned into a nightmare, mainly due to Wittgenstein's influence. Monk traces the origin of the dream back to an experience that Russell had at the age of eleven, when his older brother Frank gave him lessons in geometry. Russell described the experience as being "as dazzling as first love" and went on to say that from that moment until he finished Principia Mathe matica, written with his former teacher Alfred North Whitehead, "mathemat ics was my chief interest, and my chief source of happiness." What made geometry so attractive to Russell was that it purported to provide him and everyone else with knowledge that was so certain that no reasonable man could question its truth. -
'Solved by Sacrifice' : Austin Farrer, Fideism, and The
‘SOLVED BY SACRIFICE’ : AUSTIN FARRER, FIDEISM, AND THE EVIDENCE OF FAITH Robert Carroll MacSwain A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of St. Andrews 2010 Full metadata for this item is available in the St Andrews Digital Research Repository at: https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/ Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/920 This item is protected by original copyright ‘SOLVED BY SACRIFICE’: Austin Farrer, Fideism, and the Evidence of Faith Robert Carroll MacSwain A thesis submitted to the School of Divinity of the University of St Andrews in candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The saints confute the logicians, but they do not confute them by logic but by sanctity. They do not prove the real connection between the religious symbols and the everyday realities by logical demonstration, but by life. Solvitur ambulando, said someone about Zeno’s paradox, which proves the impossibility of physical motion. It is solved by walking. Solvitur immolando, says the saint, about the paradox of the logicians. It is solved by sacrifice. —Austin Farrer v ABSTRACT 1. A perennial (if controversial) concern in both theology and philosophy of religion is whether religious belief is ‘reasonable’. Austin Farrer (1904-1968) is widely thought to affirm a positive answer to this concern. Chapter One surveys three interpretations of Farrer on ‘the believer’s reasons’ and thus sets the stage for our investigation into the development of his religious epistemology. 2. The disputed question of whether Farrer became ‘a sort of fideist’ is complicated by the many definitions of fideism. -
Linguistic Scepticism in Mauthner's Philosophy
LiberaPisano Misunderstanding Metaphors: Linguistic ScepticisminMauthner’s Philosophy Nous sommes tous dans un désert. Personne ne comprend personne. Gustave Flaubert¹ This essayisanoverview of Fritz Mauthner’slinguistic scepticism, which, in my view, represents apowerful hermeneutic category of philosophical doubts about the com- municative,epistemological, and ontological value of language. In order to shed light on the main features of Mauthner’sthought, Idrawattention to his long-stand- ing dialogue with both the sceptical tradition and philosophyoflanguage. This con- tribution has nine short sections: the first has an introductory function and illus- tratesseveral aspectsoflinguistic scepticism in the history of philosophy; the second offers acontextualisation of Mauthner’sphilosophyoflanguage; the remain- der present abroad examination of the main features of Mauthner’sthought as fol- lows: the impossibility of knowledge that stems from aradicalisationofempiricism; the coincidencebetween wordand thought,thinkingand speaking;the notion of use, the relevanceoflinguistic habits,and the utopia of communication; the decep- tive metaphors at the root of an epoché of meaning;the new task of philosophyasan exercise of liberation against the limits of language; the controversial relationship between Judaism and scepticism; and the mystical silence as an extreme conse- quence of his thought.² Mauthnerturns scepticism into aform of life and philosophy into acritique of language, and he inauguratesanew approach that is traceable in manyGerman—Jewish -
'Sich Ausgehen': on Modalizing Go Constructions in Austrian German
‘Sich ausgehen’: On modalizing go constructions in Austrian German Remus Gergel, Martin Kopf-Giammanco Saarland University, prefinal draft, July 2020; to appear in Canadian Journal of Linguistics∗ Abstract The goal of this paper is to diagnose a verbal construction based on the verb gehen (‘go’) conjoined by a particle and the reflexive, which has made it to common use in Austrian German and is typically unknown to many speakers of Federal German who have not been exposed to Austrian German. An argument for a degree-based sufficiency construction is developed, the analysis of which is constructed by extending existing approaches in the literature on enough constructions and suggesting a meaning of the specific construction at hand which is presuppositional in multiple respects. The results of diachronic corpus searches as well as the significance of the results in the space of possibilities for the semantic change of motion verbs are discussed. Keywords: ‘go’ constructions, sufficiency, modality 1 Introduction The goal of this paper is to diagnose a construction based on the verb gehen (‘go’), a particle, and the reflexive, which has made it to common use in Austrian German: (1) Context: Stefan has an appointment in half an hour. Before that, he would like to have a cup of coffee and a quick chat with Paul. This could be a bit tight, but then he thinks: Ein Kaffee mit Paul geht sich vor dem Termin aus. a coffee with Paul goes itself before the appointment out ‘I can have a (cup of) coffee with Paul before the appointment.’/’There is enough time for a coffee with Paul before the appointment. -
Wittgenstein's Invitation to Philosophy
Nordic Wittgenstein Review 4 (No 2) 2015 Beth Savickey b.savickey @ uwinnipeg.ca “Let us imagine...”: Wittgenstein’s Invitation to Philosophy Abstract Wendy Lee-Lampshire writes that Wittgenstein’s conception of language has something valuable to offer feminist attempts to construct epistemologies firmly rooted in the social, psychological and physical situations of language users (1999: 409). However, she also argues that his own use of language exemplifies a form of life whose constitutive relationships are enmeshed in forms of power and authority. For example, she interprets the language game of the builders as one of slavery, and questions how we read and respond to it. She asks: “Who are ‘we’ as Wittgenstein’s reader(s)?” This is an important question, and how we answer offers insight not only into our own philosophical practices, but also into Wittgenstein’s use of language games. With the words “Let us imagine...”, Wittgenstein invites readers to participate in creative, collaborative, and improvisational language games that alter not only the texts themselves, but our relationship with others. 1. Introduction In the opening of the Investigations, Wittgenstein introduces the language game of the builders (in response to Augustine’s description of the learning of human language): Let us imagine a language for which the description given by Augustine is right. The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams. B has to pass the 99 Beth Savickey CC-BY stones, and that in the order in which A needs them.