These are all good points. I could agree that all words are to some degree confused, but I would insist that some of them are way more confused than others. Otherwise, the very act of explaining anything would be meaningless: we would explain one word by a bunch of words, equally confusing.
If the word “five” is nonsense, I can take the Wittgenstein’s essay explaining why it is nonsense, and say that each word in that essay is just a command that we can shout at someone, but otherwise is empty of meaning. This would seem to me like an example of intelligence defeating itself.
Wittgenstein didn’t think that everything was a command or request; his point was that making factual claims about the world is just one particular use of language that some philosophers (including early Wittgenstein) had hyper-focused on.
Anyway, his claim wasn’t that “five” was nonsense, just that when we understood how five was used there was nothing further for us to learn. I don’t know if he’d even say that the abstract concept five was nonsense, he might just say that any talk about the abstract concept would inevitably be nonsense or unjustified metaphysical speculation.
These are situations where I woud like to give a specific question to the philosopher. In this case it would be: “Is being a prime number a property of number five, or is it just that we decided to use it as a prime number?”
I honestly have no idea how he’d answer, but here’s one guess. Maybe we could tie prime numbers to one of a number of processes for determining primeness. We could observe that those processes always return true for 5, so in a sense primeness is a property of five.
These are all good points. I could agree that all words are to some degree confused, but I would insist that some of them are way more confused than others. Otherwise, the very act of explaining anything would be meaningless: we would explain one word by a bunch of words, equally confusing.
If the word “five” is nonsense, I can take the Wittgenstein’s essay explaining why it is nonsense, and say that each word in that essay is just a command that we can shout at someone, but otherwise is empty of meaning. This would seem to me like an example of intelligence defeating itself.
Wittgenstein didn’t think that everything was a command or request; his point was that making factual claims about the world is just one particular use of language that some philosophers (including early Wittgenstein) had hyper-focused on.
Anyway, his claim wasn’t that “five” was nonsense, just that when we understood how five was used there was nothing further for us to learn. I don’t know if he’d even say that the abstract concept five was nonsense, he might just say that any talk about the abstract concept would inevitably be nonsense or unjustified metaphysical speculation.
These are situations where I woud like to give a specific question to the philosopher. In this case it would be: “Is being a prime number a property of number five, or is it just that we decided to use it as a prime number?”
I honestly have no idea how he’d answer, but here’s one guess. Maybe we could tie prime numbers to one of a number of processes for determining primeness. We could observe that those processes always return true for 5, so in a sense primeness is a property of five.