Philosophical Investigations - Fragments
(From part I)
69. How should we explain to someone what a game is? I imagine that we should describe games
to him, and we might add: "This and similar things are called 'games'".
And do we know any more about it ourselves?
Is it only other people whom we cannot tell exactly what a game is?
- But this is not ignorance.
We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn.
To repeat, we can draw a boundary - for a special purpose.
Does it take that to make the concept usable?
Not at all!
(Except for that special purpose.)
No more than it took the definition: 1 pace = 75 cm. to make the measure of length 'one pace' usable.
And if you want to say "But still, before that it wasn't an exact measure", then I reply:
very well, it was an inexact one. -
Though you still owe me a definition of exactness.
129.
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.
(One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one's eyes.)
The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all.
Unless that fact has at some time struck him. -
And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.
371.
Essence is expressed by grammar.
372.
Consider: "The only correlate in language to an intrinsic necessity is an arbitrary rule.
It is the only thing which one can milk out of this intrinsic necessity into a proposition."
373.
Grammar tells what kind of object anything is.
(Theology as grammar.)
504.
But if you say: "How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?"
then I say: "How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?"
512.
It looks as if we could say:
"Word-language allows of senseless combinations of words,
but the language of imagining does not allow us to imagine anything senseless."
- Hence, too, the language of drawing doesn't allow of senseless drawings?
Suppose they were drawings from which bodies were supposed to be modelled.
In this case some drawings make sense, some not.
- What if I imagine senseless combinations of words?
608. The idea of the intangibility of that mental state in estimating the time is of the
greatest importance. Why is it intangible?
Isn't it because we refuse to count what is tangible about our state as part of the specific
state which we are postulating?
635. "I was going to say ....." -
You remember various details.
But not even all of them together show your intention.
It is as if a snapshot of a scene had been taken, but only a few scattered details of it were to be seen:
here a hand, there a bit of a face, or a hat - the rest is dark.
And now it is as if we knew quite certainly what the whole picture represented.
As if I could read the darkness.
655. The question is not one of explaining a language-game by means of our experiences,
but of noting a language-game.
(From part II)
It is impossible to imagine a guessing of intentions like the guessing of thoughts, but also a guessing of
what someone is actually going to do.
To say "He alone can know what he intends" is nonsense: to say "He alone can know what he will do", wrong.
For the prediction contained in my expression of intention (for example "When it strikes five I am going home")
need not come true, and someone else may know what will really happen.
Here it is difficult to see that what is at issue is the fixing of concepts.
A concept forces itself on one.
(This is what you must not forget.)
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