Saturday, April 21, 2012

Philosophical Investigations

First of all, I felt a bit better about this reading that the "Tractatus." I liked that Wittgenstein still used a numbering system that was much more straight forward and way less insanity-inducing for me.

In our discussion in class about language being primitive or things that existed pre-language, I really liked the topic of young children and learning to speak. Wittgenstein's description of a child using language in "Investigations" really struck me: "A child uses such primitive forms of language when it learns to talk. Here the teachings of language is not explanation, but training."

Is this true? In teaching children to teach, are we simply training them and not explaining anything? I don't know that I agree. I think teaching kids to talk is in a way explaining the entire world to them. I'm not sure if Wittgenstein is purposely trying to divide explanation from training, but I don't think those two things should be split. In training someone, particularly a child how to speak, you're not only explaining something to them but giving them the tools to then explain things themselves. Those two concepts work together.

1 comment:

  1. I think of the difference here as akin to Heidegger's "ready-to-hand" and "present-to-hand." By "Training" I think Wittgenstein means something like "practice." Sure, we can "explain" language, but that's not really the way we generally learn it; we learn it through use, trial and error, making different sounds and seeing what happens. Watching a child mastering verb tenses, for example, is an extraordinary thing, because, unlike someone learning a second language, they have no awareness that the words they're using are called "verbs" or that there are things called "tenses" or what those tenses have to do with time, etc. They just figure out, by doing it, how to do it.

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