From words and sentences to interjections: The anatomy of exclamations in Peirce and Wittgenstein

Semiotica ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 (205) ◽  
pp. 37-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dinda L. Gorlée
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Charles Sanders Peirce ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Language Games ◽  
Metaphorical Language ◽  
Degenerate Form ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Mixed Languages

AbstractInterjections are exclamatory signs fostering a realistic conception of the perils and uncertainties of human experience. Natural interjections are reactionary signs in degenerate pre-signs (preverbs or prenouns), unconnected to other syntactic forms of grammar. The simplicity of natural interjections are distinguished from the more complex occasional interjections, expressed in full pseudo-sentences with grammatical constructions. The prehistory of the natural interjections are first the simple cries of babies, and second the artificial construction of pidgin (creolization) of mixed languages. In interjections, literal language becomes transformed into figurative and metaphorical “language,” that is intermedial speech with vocalization and gestures. Peirce’s “syntax” (Charles Sanders Peirce 1839–1914) argues for the pragmatic interjections in the exclamations of spontaneous cries and shouts. In the framework of Peirce’s logical categories, interjections represent first of secondness. The degenerate form analyzes the vague or indeterminate meaning through pictures of diagrams. Wittgenstein’s social “grammar” (Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951) of language-games is subject to cultural forms of life. Wittgenstein disagrees on accepting the “nonsensical” or meaningless interjections, but in his later writings he will agree to giving the interjections fuzzy meanings.

Technological Investigations

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 296-313
Author(s):  
Langdon Winner ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Philosophy Of Technology ◽  
Language Games ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Digital Electronics ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Fresh Insight ◽  
Contemporary Technology

Although Ludwig Wittgenstein did not offer a fully developed philosophy of technology, his writings contain an approach to inquiry that can be employed to explore situations in which people contend with technological devices and systems. His notions of ‘language games’ and ‘forms of life’ as well as the dramatic, imaginary dialogues in his later writings offer ways to transcend the sometimes rigid theoretical frameworks in contemporary technology studies. Especially as applied to rapidly moving infusions of computing and digital electronics in contemporary society, Wittgenstein’s writings offer possibilities for fresh insight and even some practical alternatives.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1952)

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Richardson ◽  
Matt Statler ◽  
Saku Mantere
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Change ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Fyodor Dostoyevsky ◽  
Theory Of Change ◽  
Leo Tolstoy ◽  
Language Games ◽  
Arthur Schopenhauer ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Forms Of Life

At the age of fourteen, Ludwig Wittgenstein was exposed to the formative influence of Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Arthur Schopenhauer. Two of his important works were Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only book published during his lifetime, and Philosophical Investigations. This chapter examines Wittgenstein’s philosophy, with an emphasis on his views about doubt, silence, and metaphysics, as well as his theory of change and his account of language games. It also considers Wittgenstein’s argument that forms of life are modes of organization in which our actions agree with one another. Finally, it discusses the implications of Wittgenstein’s work for organization studies, and especially organizational change.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

scholarly journals Language-Games in the Later Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Michael Benjamin Warren Sinclair
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Language Games ◽  
Primary Reason ◽  
Great Work ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Going Concern ◽  
The People ◽  
Strange Feeling

<p>1.1 When I first looked, into Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations I felt not so much that this was great work, but that it was alive and exciting, a going concern. I next learned of its difficulty; it seemed to me then (as it does now) that Wittgenstein omitted all the preliminary easy bits that we usually find in philosophy books and, treated only of the very difficult problems which concerned him. That this was great philosophy had to be accepted, for most of the people I knew of as top philosophers said so. Its acknowledged greatness was not, however, the primary reason, nor even an important reason, for my continued reading of Wittgenstein's work it was the enigmatic style and. the strange feeling of depth in the remarks; I felt they really did say something glorious, make a powerful gesture (cf., PI, *610), if I could only figure out what.</p>

scholarly journals Revealing Humanity: the Flexible Language of Literature

2018 ◽  
pp. 231-236
Author(s):  
K. Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
English Literature ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Middle Aged ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Metaphorical Language ◽  
The Stranger ◽  
Russian Universities

The article features the linguistic peculiarities of four novels the author uses in her course on Contemporary English Fiction: Hilary Mantel’s A Change of Climate, Jim Crace’s Quarantine, Graham Swift’s Last Orders, and Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton. The novels probe deeply into some of the stranger aspects of human experience. Hilary Mantel writes of people who try to behave as balanced, rational beings, but to whom irrational and terrible things happen that have to be dealt with. The metaphorical language illuminates this philosophical exploration, which would otherwise be dull or unconvincing. The novel might seem strange for English readers, but the language carries the conviction of the true storyteller. J. Crace has a wonderful sense of exact words for an exact rhythm. Graham Swift’s novel is written as though it were the thoughts and memories of seven different characters. The language here is the colloquial vernacular, the language of elderly and middle-aged men and women with little education from south-eastLondon. The most extraordinary book of these four is Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton. It consists of twelve chapters, which are a chronological set separate ‘stories’ that happened between 1650 and 1988. Each chapter uses a different literary genre for the story-telling: for example, a simple first-person narrative, a sermon, a journal, letters to a lover, lecture notes, an internal monologue, and – ending the novel – a television script. Thorpe has therefore set himself a colossal task: to render into lively readable English, the concerns and passions of individuals, often illiterate individuals, while retaining a sense of the language appropriate to a particular era and a particular genre.Literature is an act of communication between writer and reader which does justice to humanity through expressive, imaginative language. Nobody would be so arrogant as to say that reading literature is the only way of ‘being human’ but more than most activities it forces us to think about people other than ourselves.Readers who would like to read more have available many other fine examples of contemporary English literature, provided by the Oxford Russia Fund for those taking part in the project on Contemporary English Literature in Russian Universities.

scholarly journals Forms of Life

2015 ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Hacker
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Philosophy Of Mathematics ◽  
Language Games ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Transformation Rules ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Varied History

The phrase ‘Lebensform’ (form of life) had a long and varied history prior to Wittgenstein’s use of it on a mere three occasions in the Philosophical Investigations. It is not a pivotal concept in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. But it is a minor signpost of a major reorientation of philosophy, philosophy of language and logic, and philosophy of mathematics that Wittgenstein instigated. For Wittgenstein sought to replace the conception of a language as a meaning calculus (Frege, Russell, the Tractatus) by an anthropological or ethnological conception. A language is not a class of sentences that can be formed from a set of axioms (definitions), formation and transformation rules and the meanings of which is given by their truth-conditions, but an open-ended series of interlocking language-games constituting a form of life or way of living (a culture). Wittgenstein’s uses of ‘Lebensform’ and its cognates, both in the Investigations and in his Nachlass are severally analysed, and various exegetical misinterpretations are clarified.

scholarly journals In A Mindful Moral Voice: Mindful Compassion, The Ethic of Care and Education

Paideusis ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 42-54
Author(s):  
Deborah Orr
Keyword(s):  
Mindfulness Meditation ◽  
Ethic Of Care ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Buddhist Philosophy ◽  
Professional Life ◽  
Language Games ◽  
Educational Context ◽  
Compassionate Care ◽  
Moral Voice ◽  
Central Argument

This paper argues that Carol Gilligan’s Ethic of Care has strong affinities with the Buddhist concept of karuna (compassion) which, Jay Garfield has argued, is the necessary foundation of rights theory. Its central argument is that both moral compassion and thus rights theory are grounded in the natural compassionate care a mother exercises in order to promote the flourishing of her child without which children, and consequently adult society, would not survive in any form. Wittgenstein’s concept of language-games is brought to bear on Buddhist philosophy to foreground the rootedness of human experience in connection and empathy. This further supports the naturalness of compassionate care, the Ethic of Care and karuna. Finally, mindfulness meditation is proposed as a practice appropriate for the educational context for the development of karuna as a moral resource for personal, civil and professional life.

Appearance In-Itself, Data-Propagation, and External Relationality: Towards a Realist Phenomenology of »Firstness«

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-60
Author(s):  
Mark B.N. Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Charles Sanders Peirce ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Self ◽  
Data Propagation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Aesthetic

Drawing on American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce›s »phaneroscopy«, and particularly on its point of disjunction from more orthodox phenomenology concerning the status and necessity of reception, this article argues that today’s databases phenomenalize the aesthetic dimension of worldly sensibility. Although database phenomenalizing explicitly substitutes for the phenomenalizing performed by consciousness on standard accounts of phenomenology, the important point is that it does so without severing contact with human experience. What is ultimately at stake here is the status of the phenomenon itself: insofar as it hosts the self-manifestation of the world without necessarily manifesting it to anyone or anything, the phenomenon can be disjoined from its subjective anchoring in consciousness (or any of its avatars) and ascribed to the operationality of worldly sensibility itself. </br></br>Gestützt auf die sog. »phaneroscopy« des amerikanischen Philosophen Charles Sanders Peirce und insbesondere auf ihre Differenz zur orthodoxeren Phänomenologie in Bezug auf den Status und die Notwendigkeit der Rezeption argumentiert dieser Beitrag, dass die heutigen Datenbanken die ästhetische Dimension weltlicher Sinnlichkeit phänomenalisieren. Auch wenn die Phänomenalisierung durch Datenbanken diejenige durch Bewusstsein explizit ersetzt, bleibt es bedeutsam, dass dies geschieht, ohne den Kontakt mit menschlicher Erfahrung abzubrechen. Worum es letztlich geht, ist der Status des Phänomens selbst: Insoweit es die Selbst-Manifestation der Welt beherbergt, ohne sie notwendigerweise für irgendjemand oder irgendetwas zu manifestieren, kann das Phänomen von seiner subjektiven Verankerung im Bewusstsein (oder jedem seiner Avatare) gelöst werden und der Operationalität weltlicher Sensibilität selbst zugeschrieben werden.

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