#2 That philosophical notion of meaning is at home in a primitive idea of the way language functions. But one might instead say that it is the idea of a language more primitive than ours. (查看原文)
Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child could already thinky only not yet speak. And "think" would here mean something like "talk to itself" (查看原文)
For neither the expression "to intend the definition in suchand-such a way" nor the expression "to interpret the definition in such-and-such a way" stands for a process which accompanies the giving and hearing of the definition. (查看原文)
What lies behind the idea that names really signify simples?— Socrates says in the Theaetetus: "If I make no mistake, I have heard some people say this: there is no definition of the primary elements— so to speak—out of which we and everything else are composed; for everything that exists1 in its own right can only be named, no other determination is possible, neither that it is nor that it is not . . . . . But what exists1 in its own right has to be .... . named without any other determination. In consequence it is impossible to give an account of any primary element; for it, nothing is possible but the bare name; its name is all it has. But just as what consists of these primary elements is itself complex, so the names of the elements become descriptive language by being compounded to... (查看原文)
we are sometimes even inclined to conceive the smaller as the result of a composition of greater parts, and the greater as the result of a division of the smaller (查看原文)
When we forget which colour this is the name of, it loses its meaning for us; that is, we are no longer able to play a particular language-game with it. And the situation then is comparable with that in which we have lost a paradigm which was an instrument of our language, (查看原文)
In what sense do the symbols of this language-game stand in need of analysis? How far is it even possible to replace this language-game by (48)?—It is just another language-game; even though it is related to (48). (查看原文)
And the result of this examination is: w T e see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail. (查看原文)
The kinship is that of two pictures, one of which consists of colour patches with vague contours, and the other of patches similarly shaped and distributed, but with clear contours. The kinship is just as undeniable as the difference. (查看原文)
