What is Postmodern Philosophy of Language? (Wittgenstein and Derrida)

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)

[EGOPON]

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.

[alieser]

Incredible videos, my new favorite YouTube channel by far!!!!

[ynnx]

LETS GOO, I would love to see more continental philosophy.

also: good timing for this video, right when I needed it most

[PolarSky]

Just stumbled across this channel and loving it. Thanks for the videos and sharing your knowledge 😁

[rostagno]

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

[ronjones]

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.

[revoltagainstfear]

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

[InventiveHarvest]

"He had it coming!" - a description of a dream. I caught your joke!

[RENATVS_IV]

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.

[cliffordhodge]

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?

[royzlatanestevez]

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.

[johnhill]

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.

[navneetyadav]

I think langugage could get more subjective depending upon the topic and the amount of instinctuous axioms the argument contains.

[atlas]

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 😀

[bognome]

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).

[InventiveHarvest]

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.

[Dayglodaydreams]

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).

[Pfhorrest]

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.

[tomcollector]

Kane B (Popular Philosophy Youtuber) 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

[OscarGarcia-dgis]

Send this audio file to someone to clean it. It’s bad.