Finding One’s Way Through Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations by Emmanuel Bermon & Jean-Philippe Narboux

Author:Emmanuel Bermon & Jean-Philippe Narboux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

5.2 The Breakdown of the Analogy Between Chess Pieces and Words, and Two Possible Conclusions

Now let us return to the issue of linguistic expressions and grammatical rules. I think we can see quite immediately that there is an important difference between the linguistic case and the case of chess. In the linguistic case there is nothing that corresponds to the way in which the career of a piece in a particular game of chess serves to determine that piece’s identity. In a series of moves of the same particular piece in a particular game of chess, it is the same chess piece token that is being moved. This is true even in a case where the physical item I use as bishop is exchanged for some other physical item between the moves. As I have pointed out, the relevant notion of the token identity of a chess piece is such that even if the bottle cap I initially use as a bishop is replaced mid-game by a dice, the dice becomes the same (token) bishop as the one I had before.

By contrast, in a series of utterances, one and the same linguistic expression may reoccur—but it is not the same token that is reoccurring in the different utterances. Thus, in (1)The Nile River is 6670 kilometers long;

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.