Wittgenstein's Games by A. C. Grayling

Wittgenstein's Games
Professor A C Grayling, New College of the Humanities.
Wittgenstein twice thought that he had solved all the problems of philosophy, by explaining how language acquires meaning. The first time he said that it does so by its relation to the world; the second time, by its relation to itself. To this second suggestion, the concept of “games” is central. I explain and discuss Wittgenstein’s contributions with “games” focally in view.
Biography
A C Grayling MA, DPhil (Oxon) FRSL , FRSA is Master of the New College of the Humanities, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. Until 2011 he was Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy and other subjects; among his most recent are “The Good Book”, “Ideas That Matter”, “Liberty in the Age of Terror” and “To Set Prometheus Free”. For several years he wrote the “Last Word” column for the Guardian newspaper and a column for the Times. He is a frequent contributor to the Literary Review, Observer, Independent on Sunday, Times Literary Supplement, Index on Censorship and New Statesman, and is an equally frequent broadcaster on BBC Radios 4, 3 and the World Service. He writes the “Thinking Read” column for the Barnes and Noble Review in New York, is the Editor of Online Review London, and a Contributing Editor of Prospect magazine.
In addition he sits on the editorial boards of several academic journals, and for nearly ten years was the Honorary Secretary of the principal British philosophical association, the Aristotelian Society. He is a past chairman of June Fourth, a human rights group concerned with China, and is a representative to the UN Human Rights Council for the International Humanist and Ethical Union. He is a Vice President of the British Humanist Association, the Patron of the United Kingdom Armed Forces Humanist Association, a patron of Dignity in Dying, and an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.
Anthony Grayling was a Fellow of the World Economic Forum for several years, and a member of its C-100 group on relations between the West and the Islamic world. He has served as a Trustee of the London Library and a board member of the Society of Authors. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 2003 he was a Man Booker Prize judge, in 2010 was a judge of the Art Fund prize, and in 2011 the Wellcome Book Prize. He was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.
He supports a number of charities including Plan UK, Greenpeace, Médecins Sans Frontières, Amnesty International and Freedom from Torture. He is also a sponsor of Rogbonko School in Sierra Leone.
His latest books are “The God Argument” (March 2013) and “Friendship” (September 2013).
Anthony Grayling’s new book, “The Challenge of Things” was published in March 2015.

[@CasperLCat]

It’s amazing how smart you feel, listening to a great communicator on difficult material, and how stupid, when listening to an average one. I actually understand something of Wittgenstein, now, after several fruitless tries by other philosophers.

[@Nephelokokkygia1215]

I enjoyed Professor Grayling's picture theory of the meaning of cellular antenna RFI interference

[@OnceTheyNamedMeiWasnt]

You are oil frackingly funny, Sir. Subscribed in anticipation of further drilling.

[@stoyanfurdzhev]

Extraordinary speech fluency.

[@OnceTheyNamedMeiWasnt]

It was so fluent wasn't it. No notes? No notes!

[@tonydarcy1606]

Well I learnt more from this than I did from the BBC's In Our Time, where three 'experts' rabbited on about Wittgenstein, (and a fly in a bottle), to such an extent that Melvin Bragg had to continually interrupt them, to try to get them to explain what they were saying. Incidentally, Wittgenstein's brother had his right arm blown off in WWI, and he was a concert pianist. Ravel and others wrote music for the brother after that.

[@stuartmiers9747]

How fascinating. Now bore off.

[@leonardniamh]

😎😊😉

[@adrianwright8685]

Quite agree, it is annoying when people can't stick to the point. Incidentally my sister had chicken curry for dinner yesterday.

[@nathanpayne5009]

Protip: tell your AV guy to keep his cellphone away from the recording equipment.

[@AdrienLegendre]

Professor A C Grayling is a gifted speaker. He communicated very effectively.

[@johansmits5921]

Please note that these are very subjective statements, your highness

[@OnceTheyNamedMeiWasnt]

​@@johansmits5921 He just meant it was impressive A. R'se Greybeard had no notes.

[@vincentzevecke4578]

An absolutely excellent. I learn more about language games.😊

[@paololuckyluke2854]

It seems to me, a perfectly good refutation of the Tractatus is the following: an extremely simple fact can by language be described in the most convoluted of ways.

[@mountainjay]

Resemblance, illusion, convention, or expression....which one is best?

[@Antediluvian137]

Genuinely fascinating. A great insight into what is believed to be known, and the languages we use / games that we play in representing our beliefs. Language is the fundamental building block to any assertion - language is the link between our expression and our experience, and what is remembered from past imprints of senses and connotations. And because our beliefs are fundamentally based on language, it becomes a limiting point in our pursuit to express the infinite, or the domains of senses and experiences that are beyond description. This does not make that domain not worth caring about, as plenty of reductionists and conformists would have you believe - but it means it's irreducible with our language and the methodology we employ. I love that. But I'd be lying if I said I think I'd be able to look at language the same way again - just typing this comment is an unnecessary trip 😂 but I'm pursuing it for the love of this presentation. Wittgenstein's take on language as "games" - and to so rigorously argue that some expressions or beliefs can only be expressed silently -- that is brilliant. Thank you Professor Grayling!

[@JoseSanchez-zo5tb]

*fart noise*

[@abdeez]

Great lecture. Horrible cell phone interference.

[@Antediluvian137]

Indeed - and some audio filtering would be able to remove some if not all of it. So some post production could've helped, which is partially hilarious given the introduction of "hello it is 2016 and we hope this video will be online soon instead of in months". Uploaded in 2020. I would gladly take a shot at audio editing the cell interference from this and send it to them but I can't help but feel someone experienced and with more free time should do it 😂 anyway hope the uploaders might give it a shot to apply filters on audio

[@alfredklek]

Ha, I rewound to make sure it wasn't me.

[@tristanbruns5968]

Also thought that it was somehow my fault. Glad to know that I’m not crazy.

[@Frohicky1]

When I hear Grayling on Brexit, it's all cell phone and no talk.

[@martinward2159]

Probably his wife

[@alexanderflood1462]

Perhaps the one common criterion of games is play - i.e. the very lack of a common criterion between the different instantiations of the phenomenon?

[@javedmarch4368]

But Wittgenstein just uses 'games' as a singular example; in his argument, nothing really has an 'essential' definition; they are defined through understandable yet arbitrary limitations, full of edge cases and connections, but no singular one quality. If that was only a feature of games maybe you would have a point; but you are taking his examples too literally. A much less considered point of Wittgenstein is that these 'examples' of an essential feature is usually also not unique to the definition being given. So when I say other definitions also have this lack of a common criterion, I am not just giving you Wittgenstein's much bigger point about family resemblance, but asking you, how do you define games away from other phenomena that lack common criteria? How do you know what is an instantiation of phenomena or not? How do you know what is 'play' and what is not? Trying to debunk Wittgenstein's views on definition with more definitions is never going to end well.

[@maxspellbane9595]

21:04

[@tedgrant2]

"O God, you are so big" What exactly does that proposition mean ? Discuss.

[@stryderjackson11]

All games take time

[@2msvalkyrie529]

What a magnificent mane of hair the Prof has !! I'm very jealous. ! He's 20 years older than me .!!😡

[@brickchains1]

One idea I've come up with is that Wittgenstein originally espoused in the Tractatus a materialist philosophy of language that was deterministic, and discovered that it was instead dialectical.

[@abdabtele]

This is incorrect. His theory rests on the relativity of the familiar in description of things. The familial resemblance. There is no dialectic here. Certainly not a Hegelian influence.

[@brickchains1]

@@abdabtele there are dialectics everywhere in material reality. The 'familial relation' is just describing that in a different way

[@damianbylightning6823]

@@brickchains1 What has family resemblance got to do with the Tractatus? Poor grasp. Were you taught by Grayling?

[@brickchains1]

@@damianbylightning6823 Actually I learned from Joe

[@javedmarch4368]

@@abdabtele The familial (or family) resemblance is an idea of later Wittgenstein, and doesn't need to be brought up when discussing the Tractatus.

[@Heart_and_Soul]

⚜⏳⚜ 6:06 ⚜⏳⚜

[@melofy-vibes]

37:26

[@MG-ge5xq]

Yes, it is a game. For sure. Just listen to the British Parliament. You can see it is a game. Then listen to Deutsche Bundestag. It's a game, too, but it is a different game. In many different countries, cultures, and situations: it's a game. The question that arises for me is: is this game based on good ethics, knowledge, respect, and competence? And: is this game rather for the quick and short laughter, or is it leading us towards a positive direction?

[@nancymohass4891]

He talks about the topic on 40:10 min ,!

[@stryderjackson11]

Thought he said language gates

[@massaokohatsu719]

c'mon!!! at 41min this guy is saying that Wittgenstein read basically only Russell. Brother read far more extensively. This is just false. He read Schop, Kierk, Hegel, maybe Gadamer, Kant, Dostoesvsky, Goethe...

[@Albeit_Jordan]

It just seems like logical positivism is fundamentally flawed, like it's very foundation is effectively paradoxical... Like "meaning" is obviously not a word reflective of something empirical, so logical positivism says it's meaningless or absurd, so then it doesn't actually "mean" anything for something to be either meaningful or meaningless, but what then does it even "mean" to say such a thing if that's the case? Would Wittgenstein not say that a question like "what is the soul?" is meaningless/absurd because the soul is not empirical, while a question like "what is a cat? is *not* meaningless/absurd because a cat _is_ empirical -- but both a shoe and a platypus are empirical and so by logical positivism dictum a question like "what is a shoe multiplied by a platypus?" (which also happens to be mathematical) is not a meaningless/absurd question... and that's kind of how I perceive everything that I've read of Wittgenstein's later works -- it's the equivalent of asking "what is a shoe multiplied by a platypus?", in other words it's vapid word salad.

[@javedmarch4368]

Your first point is very much correct, it's the standard criticism of logical positivism, and although they tried to suggest that this criticism was false, it is very much obvious that logical positivism is ultimately narrow and unconvincing. Your second point confuses me though- logical positivists would never state that 'what is a shoe times a platypus' is meaningful as a question. Also must clarify that Wittgenstein was never a logical positivist in his Tractatus days, and definitely wasn't and couldn't have been in his later years. This point about Wittgenstein's later works just makes no sense.

[@nathanokun8801]

Language is more basic than given here: It is a method triggering a CHANGE in the mental state of yourself and/or others by presenting a new structure of thought in the pattern of the words that you use on the current structure before the words of the thought were presented. In this, languages can be MUCH different from one-another due to the baseline structures of the initial concepts on which the thoughts of the language users are based. For example, there are languages with MUCH different ideas of what time is and literally cannot state things about time that exist in, say, English. The problems are more deep than that, of course, but this gives a small example. As such, we have to understand what THOUGHT and HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS are to understand how language (WHICH WHOLLY EXISTS >>>ONLY

[@leonardniamh]

As music

[@islaymmm]

Could you kindly give me an example of a language that can't 'state things about time that exists in English' and possibly clarify what you meant by 'time'? Because I would certainly agree if by time you meant grammatical tenses specifically (which I suspect you did), but that's not really interesting because even languages which lack equivalent tenses can talk about everything English can, by using different tactics other than grammatical tenses. Chinese for example doesn't have grammatical tenses, but I'm sure Chinese people can talk about the past and the future, using various particles.

[@dianahill5116]

You should consider learning, what a paragraph is used for.

[@dianahill5116]

Joke: What happens when you remove a little bit of sand from an hour-glass? You end-up being short on time.

[@methods3110]

All games have one thing in common: competing. Competing against others; competing against things such as machines and animals; or competing against oneself. How come oneself? In the process of all learning one part of the brain asks a question, and another part of the brain answers the question, then refers back to the first part for verification or modification, in a sort of dialogue. It is as if there are 2 persons, and in this way they seem to compete against each other.

[@javedmarch4368]

This is a very loose definition of 'competing'- in fact, as a definition of competition, it is not essentially identical to all instances of 'competing' but shares a family resemblance of features, as much as differing examples or definitions of 'games' do. So, either way, either you are wrong about all games involving some feature of competition (and indeed, I think you are- it would be a bit far-fetched to suggest that me bouncing a ball by myself is 'competing', though it does count as a game- you can use it this way if you want, but it only serves to highlight my next point;), or you are only re-iterating Wittgenstein's point, insofar that your use of 'competing' is only informed by the individual form of life or language game it is citing, rather than being a crystallised, singular definition with a definitive and objective use case. The use of 'competition' whilst not being necessary to define a game, is also not sufficient to do so, as there are of course non-games that require some kind of competition. It's important to remember that the building blocks of language are also language, and that Wittgenstein's language games can't be debunked or resolved by appealing to yet more iterations of definition that follow the same rules.

[@Silly.Old.Sisyphus]

an excellent overview of obsolete half-baked misunderstandings

[@Silly.Old.Sisyphus]

@fifaldo by all means :) the misunderstandings are Wittgenstein's. He had a brilliant mind, but he was a man of his time so only had the tools of that time to work with, and he came up with explanations about the meaning of meaning that were off the mark.

[@plekkchand]

@@Silly.Old.Sisyphus With elaborations like that, who needs self-satisfied assertions?

[@Silly.Old.Sisyphus]

@@plekkchand with trollings like that, who needs reflective critiques?

[@southernCal909]

Yea, but what of a deaf or mute person?

[@dirkbertels3872]

They too have language

[@artlessons1]

I wouldn’t use an atheist ( as is Grayling ) to describe Wittgenstein Games because it’s a different language game. Wittgenstein had a deep respect for religion and felt its language was not about philosophical gibberish. He found Russel's logic met a dead end, was bored and moved on., developing his new thoughts. Grayling, like Russel, is just a stuffy talker, who talks about things that are outside of their boundaries of understanding. If you disagree with that, it is because you are waving the atheist flag rather than understanding Wittgenstein.

[@kurtgodel5236]

It's?

[@dianahill5116]

Critical thinking doesn't need religion.

[@dianahill5116]

Science doesn't need religion.

[@dianahill5116]

Societies and cultures never needed religion.

[@dianahill5116]

Everyone is born atheist. Religion has to be taught. Atheism doesn't.

[@kakistocracyusa]

The silly notion that it was Bertrand Russell who first profoundly "realized" that math is a form of logic is so incredibly dumb that only the museum curators and closet-theologians that occupy the philosophy departments could believe in something so delusional. "Philosophy" as a supposed history of human thought is also a game, a word-game, and a rather farcical game at that.

[@columbmurray]

Woke Cambridge is now totally discredited , isn't it ?

[@stuartmiers9747]

Grayling is an anti-democratic fascist. Revolting man. He has nothing of interest to say anymore. And to think I used to admire his writings - This 'philosopher' has gone right off the rails.

[@dsa3df3]

Wikipedia disagrees with your assertion: "His political affiliations lie on the centre-left, and he has defended human rights and politically liberal values in print and by activism."

[@theeffectsofgamesonworldhi8916]

I suggest to you, fellow seeker of thoughts, that we save the word fascist for people who deserve it there are plenty out there today sadly. It loses its utility when casually applied to academics whose world view can best be described as "not sure". I respect self doubt in anyone but particularly a philosopher.

[@Antediluvian137]

@Stuart Miers, I'm interested - did you listen to his presentation? That's quite a wild assertion to make with no evidence - and it's not something I got the slightest whiff of when listening to him.

[@stuartmiers9747]

@@Antediluvian137 Here's proof - Scratch a far-leftist and you'll find a fascist beneath the veneer of 'liberalism' kzbin.info/www/bejne/hYW8dGSQq9l3a5I

[@sansabasongbird5130]

Stuart Miers you’re quite the dick, aren’t you? You’re not critiquing Grayling, you’re just grinding your own ax at his expense. Ef you, very much!