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The New Age is not a creed, but the realization that we can view the universe in a different way!
The methodology of the later Wittgenstein was developed to avoid the treatises’ that were funneled into narrow blind alleys by structural determinism. The language game allowed Wittgenstein to talk about what language was but not be burdened by necessity of arguing how it fit into the structured definition of how language worked. It was obvious he did not agree with structuralism, but he showed how structuralism did not and could not work without mentioning that his arguments were related to “them”.
"For a large class of cases -- though not for all -- in which we employ the word meaning it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language."
The statement: ”the meaning of a word was in its use”, showed that any structure of language was not some transcendental. We (as a group and over time) invented this language (whatever language) for our use, and we own it.
“But why am I so certain that this is my hand? Doesn’t the whole language-game rest on this kind of certainty [Sicherheit]? Or: isn’t this ‘certainty’ already presupposed in the language-game? Namely by virtue of the fact that one is not playing the game, or is playing wrong, if one does not recognize objects with certainty.”
That this is my hand may be true, but is it necessarily significant? It is just part of the language game.
“If someone supposed that all our calculations were uncertain and that we could rely on none of them (justifying himself by saying that mistakes are always possible) perhaps we would say he was crazy. But can we say he is in error? Does he not just react differently? We rely on calculations, he doesn’t; we are sure, he isn’t.”
All our calculations cannot be wrong. At least the results are close enough to live by; except when we try to balance our checkbook. Balancing the checkbook doesn’t count in the language game; does it?
If I wanted to doubt whether this was my hand, how could I avoid doubting whether the word "hand" has any meaning? So that is something I seem to know after all.
After all this is my hand, not yours.
Jerome Heath
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