Wittgenstein's Games by A. C. Grayling

Wittgenstein's Games
Professor A C Grayling, New College of the Humanities.
Wittgenstein twice thought that he had solved all the problems of philosophy, by explaining how language acquires meaning. The first time he said that it does so by its relation to the world; the second time, by its relation to itself. To this second suggestion, the concept of “games” is central. I explain and discuss Wittgenstein’s contributions with “games” focally in view.

Biography

A C Grayling MA, DPhil (Oxon) FRSL , FRSA is Master of the New College of the Humanities, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. Until 2011 he was Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy and other subjects; among his most recent are “The Good Book”, “Ideas That Matter”, “Liberty in the Age of Terror” and “To Set Prometheus Free”. For several years he wrote the “Last Word” column for the Guardian newspaper and a column for the Times. He is a frequent contributor to the Literary Review, Observer, Independent on Sunday, Times Literary Supplement, Index on Censorship and New Statesman, and is an equally frequent broadcaster on BBC Radios 4, 3 and the World Service. He writes the “Thinking Read” column for the Barnes and Noble Review in New York, is the Editor of Online Review London, and a Contributing Editor of Prospect magazine.

In addition he sits on the editorial boards of several academic journals, and for nearly ten years was the Honorary Secretary of the principal British philosophical association, the Aristotelian Society. He is a past chairman of June Fourth, a human rights group concerned with China, and is a representative to the UN Human Rights Council for the International Humanist and Ethical Union. He is a Vice President of the British Humanist Association, the Patron of the United Kingdom Armed Forces Humanist Association, a patron of Dignity in Dying, and an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.

Anthony Grayling was a Fellow of the World Economic Forum for several years, and a member of its C-100 group on relations between the West and the Islamic world. He has served as a Trustee of the London Library and a board member of the Society of Authors. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 2003 he was a Man Booker Prize judge, in 2010 was a judge of the Art Fund prize, and in 2011 the Wellcome Book Prize. He was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

He supports a number of charities including Plan UK, Greenpeace, Médecins Sans Frontières, Amnesty International and Freedom from Torture. He is also a sponsor of Rogbonko School in Sierra Leone.

His latest books are “The God Argument” (March 2013) and “Friendship” (September 2013).

Anthony Grayling’s new book, “The Challenge of Things” was published in March 2015.

[Nephelokokkygia]

I enjoyed Professor Grayling's picture theory of the meaning of cellular antenna RFI interference

[septillionsuns]

Protip: tell your AV guy to keep his cellphone away from the recording equipment.

[CasperLCat]

It’s amazing how smart you feel, listening to a great communicator on difficult material, and how stupid, when listening to an average one.

I actually understand something of Wittgenstein, now, after several fruitless tries by other philosophers.

[AdrienLegendre]

Professor A C Grayling is a gifted speaker. He communicated very effectively.

[tonydarcy]

Well I learnt more from this than I did from the BBC's In Our Time, where three 'experts' rabbited on about Wittgenstein, (and a fly in a bottle), to such an extent that Melvin Bragg had to continually interrupt them, to try to get them to explain what they were saying. Incidentally, Wittgenstein's brother had his right arm blown off in WWI, and he was a concert pianist. Ravel and others wrote music for the brother after that.

[giantessmaria]

what a fabulous articulator this man is! thanks much!

[paololuckyluke]

It seems to me, a perfectly good refutation of the Tractatus is the following: an extremely simple fact can by language be described in the most convoluted of ways.

[Antediluvian]

Genuinely fascinating. A great insight into what is believed to be known, and the languages we use / games that we play in representing our beliefs. 
Language is the fundamental building block to any assertion - language is the link between our expression and our experience, and what is remembered from past imprints of senses and connotations. And because our beliefs are fundamentally based on language, it becomes a limiting point in our pursuit to express the infinite, or the domains of senses and experiences that are beyond description. This does not make that domain not worth caring about, as plenty of reductionists and conformists would have you believe - but it means it's irreducible with our language and the methodology we employ. I love that. 
But I'd be lying if I said I think I'd be able to look at language the same way again - just typing this comment is an unnecessary trip 😂 but I'm pursuing it for the love of this presentation. Wittgenstein's take on language as "games" - and to so rigorously argue that some expressions or beliefs can only be expressed silently -- that is brilliant. Thank you Professor Grayling!

[mountainjay]

Resemblance, illusion, convention, or expression....which one is best?

[vincentzevecke]

An absolutely excellent. I learn more about language games.😊

[abdeez]

Great lecture. Horrible cell phone interference.

[alexanderflood]

Perhaps the one common criterion of games is play - i.e. the very lack of a common criterion between the different instantiations of the phenomenon?

[massaokohatsu]

c'mon!!! at 41min this guy is saying that Wittgenstein read basically only Russell. Brother read far more extensively. This is just false. He read Schop, Kierk, Hegel, maybe Gadamer, Kant, Dostoesvsky, Goethe...

[tedgrant]

"O God, you are so big"
What exactly does that proposition mean ?
Discuss.

[MG-gexq]

Yes, it is a game. For sure. Just listen to the British Parliament. You can see it is a game. Then listen to Deutsche Bundestag. It's a game, too, but it is a different game. In many different countries, cultures, and situations: it's a game. The question that arises for me is: is this game based on good ethics, knowledge, respect, and competence? And: is this game rather for the quick and short laughter, or is it leading us towards a positive direction?

[brickchains]

One idea I've come up with is that Wittgenstein originally espoused in the Tractatus a materialist philosophy of language that was deterministic, and discovered that it was instead dialectical.

[msvalkyrie]

What a magnificent mane of hair the Prof has !! I'm very
jealous. ! He's 20 years older than me .!!😡

[Albeit_Jordan]

It just seems like logical positivism is fundamentally flawed, like it's very foundation is effectively paradoxical... Like "meaning" is obviously not a word reflective of something empirical, so logical positivism says it's meaningless or absurd, so then it doesn't actually "mean" anything for something to be either meaningful or meaningless, but what then does it even "mean" to say such a thing if that's the case?

Would Wittgenstein not say that a question like "what is the soul?" is meaningless/absurd because the soul is not empirical, while a question like "what is a cat? is *not* meaningless/absurd because a cat _is_ empirical -- but both a shoe and a platypus are empirical and so by logical positivism dictum a question like "what is a shoe multiplied by a platypus?" (which also happens to be mathematical) is not a meaningless/absurd question...

and that's kind of how I perceive everything that I've read of Wittgenstein's later works -- it's the equivalent of asking "what is a shoe multiplied by a platypus?", in other words it's vapid word salad.

[havenbastion]

All things are real as a pattern in a mind.
Some things have an external referent.
They're are two kinds of things; a set of attributes and boundary conditions, or a relationship between them.
Languages are exactly as useful as their ability to describe reality.

[havenbastion]

"The current King of France is wise" is a simple relationship between two things, regardless of whether they exist in reality. The current King of France can be wise in a novel without being wise in reality. That's ambiguity, not truth value.