Another probleme here. Since everything which is a language
game is all right, why say that philosophy (as such) is
not all right? There is no reason for
not regarding philosophy as another language game, one may think.
As long as we have different speakers involved in a philosophical
discussion, speaking according to some special commonly
agreed conventions and rules, we must have a language game,
too. In fact, one may think, we have many philosophical language games.
I am not so sure that Wittgenstein would agree with philosophy
being a language game.
What he can say, despite this, is
that all of them differ from the language games of the
common language in at least one respect, namely that they
have not organically grown up in a form of life. To put it
shortly, they are in no way related with our common life
habits, tasks or purposes as humans and are therefore
dispensable.
I asked myself the same question some time ago,
maybe because I took the later Wittgenstein to be a
relativist. I had the impression that, in Wittgenstein's
model, one can not escape from the level of language and
find some external criteria for what would be a right or
wrong use of a word. Some people have said that this is not
so, because Wittgenstein never abandoned his representation
theory (one of them is Hintikka, for instance), so you can
always check and see if there is something in the world to
correspond to a descriptive sentence. I do not think,
however, that this will answer the question.
The first answer that seemed satisfactory to me, at
that time, was given to me by Adrian Paul Iliescu - a few
years ago. He based his answer on Wittgenstein's metaphor
of common language as an old city with tortuous streets.
Doing philosophical analysis would be like building some
new, symmetrically ordered streets at the periphery. Only
that this won't help you to find your way in the old city.
For instance, when one initiates the analysis of the
concept "knowledge", he is supposed to deal with the word
as in its every day use. Instead, either the word is
grabbed from its place in the common language and
transformed into a concept which has nothing to do with it,
or a homonymic word is construed by means of analysis,
who's definition will affect in no way your mastery of the
usual word.
Anyway, the answer was not perfect. One may ask:
"Why should the analyst be taken to explain something about
the usual word?" In which sense is the common language
privileged? Here, I think, Wittgenstein's answer would be
that only the common language relies on a (genuine) form of
life. The analogy with the old city stops here. You may
always think that you can rebuild the center of the old
city, but you cannot imagine yourself (and the rest of the
people) speaking some sort of philosophical idiolect 24
hours a day. (No way, sir. You won't speak of res extensa
when you buy yourself a pair of shoes.)
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