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comment by b_b
b_b  ·  625 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What is a Woman, Anyway?

Invoking Wittgenstein in this “debate” misunderstands Wittgenstein entirely. All of the Philosophic Investigations can be summed up in the passage where the the one guy tells the other guy that the way you know what the color red is is by someone pointing to a red object and saying that thing is red, which is followed by this (brilliant) passage:

    "So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?" It is what human beings say that is true and false ; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.

What Wittgenstein is getting at, I believe, and I’m admittedly no student of philosophy, is that descriptivism (which was popular when he was writing) fails entirely on even a cursory cross examination. Until we agree on a concept, we cannot understand one another, and importantly, those concepts are impenetrable to further language dissection.

So to use that to champion some asshole who’s out there trying to play gotcha with academics completely and totally misses one of the only good revelations that 20th c. philosophy ever brought us.