Language Games

I think the DePape dialogue is another example of people speaking different languages. For the most part the "we don't have the whole story" people aren't speaking a literal language but a figurative, emotive one.

/1https://t.co/b7Sm9nBm3N

— RiggedAndStollenHat (@Popehat) November 1, 2022

/3 They're not speaking in the language of literal truth. They're conveying a message about whom they hate and whom they hold in contempt. They're conveying "those are the bad people, we're the good people."

— RiggedAndStollenHat (@Popehat) November 1, 2022

So, like this?

"GOP Candidate Said Elites Drink Blood, Sell ‘Baby Body Parts’ After Abortion" https://t.co/ITlOnngCGt

— Mark Pitcavage (@egavactip) November 1, 2022

And the difference between being a “marker” and being literal truth is…?

I noted the other day that it functions much like responses to the question of whether Obama was a Muslim. Whether he was actually a Muslim was not the point, so much as having a quick and socially acceptable means to other him.

— Centre Left in Europe (@dslakter) November 1, 2022

A/k/a "racism."

And since that started with DePape, here’s a summary of his statement:

Read it for yourself. Here's the FBI's summary of what it says was a Mirandized interview with the man who attacked Paul Pelosi. pic.twitter.com/EeE8QdYXyh

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) October 31, 2022

And here’s somebody else just marking his territory:

"The glass it seems was broken from the inside to the out, so it wasn't a break-in, it was a break-out," Trump said. "I don't know -- you hear the same things I do."

And since I mentioned "language games," a quote from Wittgenstein:

Suppose I say that the body will rot, and another says "No. Particles will rejoin in a thousand years, and there will be a Resurrection of you." If some said: "Wittgenstein, do you believe in this?" I'd say: "No." "Do you contradict the man?" I'd say: "No."

...

Suppose someone were a believer and said: "I believe in a Last Judgment," and I said: "Well, I'm not so sure. Possibly." You would say that there is an enormous gulf between us.  If he said "There is a German aeroplane overhead," and I said "Possibly I'm not so sure," you'd say we were fairly near.  It isn't a question of my being anywhere near him, but on an entirely different plane, which you could express by saying: "You mean something altogether different, Wittgenstein."

...

Whether something is a blunder or not--it is a blunder in a particular system. Just as something is a blunder in a particular game and not in another.

The question is, is a social marker something altogether different? Are there two different games here?  Or not? 

"The sense of the world must lie outside the world....in it no value exists...Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, §6.41.

"A man may sing a song with expression and without expression. Then why not leave out the song--could you have the expression then?"--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief