Wittgenstein Chess Metaphors

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Let us now turn to the chess metaphor. Wittgenstein invokes it in PI 136. His point? That the earlier suggestions about the relation between "proposition" and "truth" are too strong. The key-passage is this: Check might be said to belong to the notion of king, but not to 'fit' it. In reference to the "belonging", one can notice that it is part of how we play chess that we check the king. So, in important aspects the concept of "check" is a "constituent part" of the concept of "king". Despite that, it is improper to say that the there is a "fit" between the two concepts. If that were the case, we would be proned to disregard e.g. a game in which we check the pawns. A game in which we don't check the king would seem, as Wittgenstein puts it,…show more content…
He now believes that it is use that confers meaning. In this new perspective, if a child would answer the question "How's the weather?" with "It is raining" when it is snowing, we would say that he has not yet learned the correct use of the proposition. We would still consider that the child does not know the meaning of the proposition. But we would say that he is not clear about the conditions that justify one in asserting (or using) "It is raining". That is not to say that a proposition cannot still be said to be true or false. It is one thing to deny that there is a "fitting" relationship between the notions. It is yet another to say that they do not “belong" to each other, and Wittgenstein does not do that. As he puts it, “the use of the words “true” and “false” may be among the constituent parts of the game” in which meaning is determined. However, the idea of truth and falsehood in play is not that of correspondence. In fact, Wittgenstein adheres to the characteristic deflationary equivalence according to which: “p” is true =p and “p” is false =…show more content…
Now that this short intuitive reconstruction is in place, let me return to where we left off before I started it. Let us now ask: how did OS come to be? A somewhat indirect answer to this question is preferable here. For the sake of convenience, let us distinguish between two ways of approaching Wittgenstein. One's interest might be to find out what Wittgenstein actually had to say. Such a reader would dedicate himself to understanding Wittgenstein's problems and his solutions. Differently, one could be looking for an interlocutor for her or his own philosophical project and find one in Wittgenstein. These two mind-sets are retractable in the available literature. The former is characteristic for interpreters who are best referred to as Wittgensteinian scholarship. The latter, for analytic philosophers that came into contact with Wittgenstein somewhat "along the way”. Of course, it is not possible to fit all authors in these categories. The distinction is often simplistic . It is nonetheless useful to keep it in mind for the purposes of the present analysis. One can say that authors who fit better in the second category were the ones that first proposed OS, and that the significant reactions from the authors of the first type then made it popular. Yet, this is also a bit unfair. It is rather incorrect to say that the origins of OS had nothing to do with Wittgensteinian scholarship. The origins, the fortune and the decline of OS are closely connected to how Wittgensteinian

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