Language & Meaning: Crash Course Philosophy #26 Video Lecture | What is Philosophy - Science or Religion? - Self Help Learning

What is a game?
Easy question, right?
You know what a game is – there’s basketball, Chutes and Ladders, Dungeon and Dragons, tennis, Wizard School!
But those are examples of games.
What I’m asking for is the definition of a game.
Maybe, if you haven’t been keeping up with
Crash Course Games, you’d simply say that,
a game is a competition, with winners and
losers.
But, what about a game like ring around the
rosie?
Does a game require at least two players?
No, there is literally a game called solitaire
solitaire.
Maybe a game is just a thing you do for fun.
But what about “who can stay quiet the longest”
–
the game that your parents used to use on
long car trips?
Or, like, Russian roulette?
Or The Game of Thrones, where you win or you
die?
When it comes to language, there’s a lot
to philosophize about.
But one question that philosophers of language
like to mull is the question of meaning.
What do words – like ‘game’ or ‘red’ or ‘banana’
What do they mean?
How do we know what they mean?
And who gets to decide?
[Theme Music]
Language is one of our most nuanced and powerful
tools.
It takes all of the stuff that’s swirling around in each of our lonely, isolated brains – all those thoughts – and transfers them into someone else’s brain.
Which is really, fabulously cool.
It’s like telepathy!
But with the extra step of actually speaking
or writing.
But, how do words – a collection of sounds or written symbols – key into the mental concepts that we want to communicate?
The naive understanding of what words mean is just that they’re just whatever the dictionary says.
But we know that’s not totally true.
Think about the difference between words like ‘cat,’ ‘kitty,’ ‘mouser,’ and ‘feline’.
Early 20th century German philosopher Gottlab Frege helped parse out this difference by drawing a distinction between what he called sense, and reference.
The reference of a word is the object or concept
that it’s meant to designate.
The reference of all these words is this.
Sense, on the other hand, is the way in which
the words tie us to the object or concept.
So, while the reference of each of these words
is the same, they have different senses.
A kitty might be a baby cat, or sort of fancy
lap cat,
while a mouser might be a cat that lives in
a barn and kills rodents for a living.
So how do words get their meaning?
A definition is traditionally understood as whatever meets the conditions for both necessity and sufficiency.
A necessary condition is what’s needed – like, what must be present – in order for a thing to be a thing.
In order for X to be X.
A necessary condition of being a bachelor,
for example, is that you must be unmarried.
A sufficient condition is something that’s
enough for X to be X,
but it’s not required for that thing to
meet that definition.
For example, being born in the United States is a sufficient condition for being an American citizen.
But it’s not a necessary condition, because people who weren’t born in the US can still become citizens.
The long-standing view of definitions was that, if you can figure out both the necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be X, then you’ll have your definition.
That is, you’ll have found the criteria
that exclude all non-X’s, but include all X’s.
If you’re following me.
But 20th century Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said this rigid concept of definitions doesn’t actually work.
For example, you just can’t define the word ‘game’ in a way that’s going to make everybody happy.
Any definition you give, someone’s going
to come up with a counterexample –
either some game that’s excluded by the
definition,
or something that the definition includes
that not everyone would agree is a game.
It took Andre and entire 10 minute episode
to define games!
But the thing is, Wittgenstein said this doesn’t matter!
Because, everyone knows what a game is!
He pointed out that we learn and know the
meaning of words
by hearing the way other members of our linguistic
community use them.
We hear Candyland, rugby, and Cards Against
Humanity all referred to as games,
so eventually our brains piece together what’s
common between them,
in a recognition that Wittgenstein called
family resemblance.
You know how you can just see the relation
between people sometimes?
Rather than rigid definitions, Wittgenstein
said word meanings are so-called cluster concepts.
There’s no one element that everything in
the cluster has in common,
but they all share something with some other
members of the group.
It’s sort of like you have your dad’s
nose and your mom’s sense of humor,
and your sister has your mom’s eyes and
your dad’s athleticism.
You and your sister don’t really have much
in common, but you do both resemble both parents.
But it’s not like every concept in the cluster
is equal.
The ones that everyone would accept are the paradigm cases – you can picture them in the center of the
cluster.
And as you move to the outer edges you’ll get fringe cases, the ones that some people would include in the group but others would exclude.
Everyone will agree that football is a game, but there’s going to be some disagreement about things like,
I don’t know, knife fights, or how long
you can hold your breath under water.
And Wittgenstein said that’s fine.
Language is a living phenomenon, and like most living things, there’s going to be change and variation.
But who gets to decide what words mean, or
if a meaning is legitimate?
Here, Wittgenstein said, “meaning is use.”
In other words, as long as a linguistic community uses a word in a particular way, it has that meaning.
Watching the way words develop and change does suggest that Wittgenstein was onto something.
I mean, ‘mouse’ didn’t used to mean
that thing, but now it does.
We make words up as we need them.
And at the same time, words also fall out
of use, or take on entirely new meanings.
Now, this view of language assumes that meaning
is tied to a particular linguistic communities.
And a community might, or might not, span
all of the speakers of that language.
Think about the regional differences in words that might be specific to your town, or school, or group of friends, or family.
And what about this: Do you and your best friend have code words – words that you use to talk privately, even when you’re in public?
Like, the two of you could be at a club, and
one of you would say to the other:
“That guy at the bar is a total shoehorn” and the other one would know exactly what you meant?
In that case, do those words, that have meaning
specific to the two of you,
really mean what you say they mean, even if
no one else agrees with you?
And what happens if the two of you forget
that meaning?
Is the meaning still there?
Or does it only exist as long as someone uses
the word that way?
Let’s bounce over to the Thought Bubble
for a bit of Flash Philosophy.
A linguistic community of two – like you
and your friend – seems fairly plausible.
But is it possible to have an entirely private
language?
Wittgenstein asked us to imagine that each
of us has a box, and inside each box is something.
We all refer to the thing in our box as ‘a beetle,’ but no one can see inside anyone else’s box, ever.
We all call our hidden thing a beetle, but we have no idea if the content of our boxes is the same.
Wittgenstein said there’s no way we can meaningfully use the word ‘beetle’ in this context,
because we have no way of verifying what others mean when they use the word, and they have no way of verifying what we mean.
This is meant to illustrate how it’s impossible
to directly communicate our subjective experiences.
We all use the word ‘red’ to refer to
the color we see when we look at a stop sign,
but I have no way of knowing if you’re actually
seeing the same thing that I’m seeing.
I don’t know if your pain feels like my
pain or your love feels like my love.
Our minds are like boxes.
No one else can see what’s inside.
But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter.
Because ‘beetle’ just means, ‘what’s
in the box.’
It could literally be a beetle, or it could
be a fox! In socks!
The point is, we don’t know if the color red in my mind is the same as the color red in your mind, because the color red is a beetle in a box.
It’s a label for what’s in our minds.
So language, Wittgenstein said, can’t refer
directly to an internal state,
like what it’s like to see the color red,
or to experience pain.
Instead, it can only refer to the aspect of
it that’s publicly observable by other people.
So, the word ‘pain’ isn’t the feeling of physical suffering, it’s jumping on one foot and cursing when you stub a toe.
It’s rubbing your temples when you have a headache – the observable behaviors that are associated with it.
Thanks, Thought Bubble!
Now I want to propose an experiment.
If use is meaning, you should be able to give
a word meaning by using it, right?
At least, if you can convince a linguistic
community to go there with you.
So let’s try it.
If every Crash Course viewer starts referring to bananas as chom choms, can we make it catch on?
Can we create meaning?!
We’ll have to stay tuned for the answer to that one, but in the meantime, we can think about what might happen.
And to do that, we need to make a distinction
between two different types of meaning.
When people communicate verbally, there’s speaker meaning, which is what the speaker intends when using a word.
And then there’s audience meaning, which
is what the audience understands.
Since the whole point of language is communication, our goal is for speaker meaning and audience meaning to match up.
But, as anyone who’s ever, like, had a conversation,
knows, this doesn’t always work out.
Like, Billy tells Bobby that he likes Sally.
Billy, the speaker, means that he likes Sally
as a friend.
Bobby, the audience, takes Billy’s statement
to be a profession of, like, you know, like-like.
So Bobby then goes and tells Sally that Billy like-likes her, when in fact Billy actually like-likes Suzy, and pretty soon, you know how it goes. Tears.
The point is, that even with a simple word
that we all think we understand, like ‘like,’
speaker meaning and audience meaning can fail
to connect.
When we get into more complicated or nuanced words, or when we try to invent a new word, like chom chom,
we’re likely to run into some pretty high-level
speaker-meaning/audience-meaning confusion.
But for now, we learned about meaning.
We talked about sense and reference, beetles
in boxes, and language games.
And we learned that bananas are called chom choms.
Repeat it with me: chom choms.
Never say bananas again.
Next time, we’re going to talk about another
linguistic concept – conversational implicature.
Crash Course Philosophy is produced in association
with PBS Digital Studios.
You can head over to their channel to check out a playlist of the latest episodes from shows like
PBS Idea Channel, It's Okay to be Smart, and
Physics Girl.
This episode of Crash Course was filmed in
the Doctor Cheryl C. Kinney Crash Course Studio
with the help of all of these awesome people
and our equally fantastic graphics team is
Thought Cafe.