Sunday, April 5, 2009

The Rules of the Game



95. The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology. And their role is like that of rules of a a game;





What if the player acts to directly oppose the rules? It is the same for the one who plays obediently. At some point, the losses will necessitate either a return to the game or a position of abjection.

467. I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that that's a tree, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: "This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy.

In the position of the abject, that is to say, in philosophy, anything is possible, even if most things are extremely unlikely.


How do we get from the ordinary sensory data to objects, and how then from objects to belief? Wittgenstein would say that a belief in ordinary objects is not so different from a belief in God.


144. The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

203. If everything speaks for an hypothesis and nothing against it , is it objectively certain? One can call it that. But does it necessarily agree with the world of facts? At the very best it shows us what "agreement" means. We find it difficult to imagine it to be false, but also difficult to make use of it.