Logic Lane, Oxford
Alan Turing (1912-1954)
Courtesy of Sherborne School archive
“When one shows someone the king in chess and says: “This is the king”, this does not tell him the use of this piece—unless he already knows the rules of the game up to this last point: the shape of the king. You could imagine his having learnt the rules of the game without ever having been shown an actual piece. The shape of the chessman corresponds here to the sound or shape of a word.”
-Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Kurt Godel
The semantic function of words is the fact that any meaningful part of a language is essentially a ‘tool’ which can be used correctly or incorrectly in the context of a larger totality of linguistic equipment or technology, and the semantic application of words is the fact that the meaning of a word depends on its implementation in actual or possible speech-contexts and speech-communities. Of course semantic function and application can come apart when language is either misused (which produces nonsense) or applied in new contexts (which produces new sense). But normally they are smoothly complementary
From referentialism to human action, Robert Hanna
“The right method of philosophy would be this: To say nothing except what can be said”
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (6.53) , Ludwig Wittgenstein
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