Edwina and Stephen, ET
what's the difference between a 'language game' and a 'grammatical sentence'?
A sentence is just one move in a language game. For more about Wittgenstein's language games and their relationship to logic and computer programs, see the article "Language Games, Natural and Artificial": http://jfsowa.com/pubs/lgames.pdf See page 3 of lgames.pdf, which quotes some examples of language games from his later book _Logical Investigations_. And by the way, Wittgenstein's original term was 'Sprachspiel'. The word 'Spiel' in German is somewhat broader than the English 'game'. It would include noncompetitive play as well as games that involve competition. It's closer to Peirce's word 'musement', which he defined as "pure play": http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/musement SCR
I claim logic is good.
Oh. Now I realize that you were talking about logic as one of the normative sciences, since it defines the criteria for truth. But note that Peirce classifies logic in two places. Formal logic is a subset of mathematics, which is prior to all versions of philosophy. But logic is also one of the normative sciences. As such, it depends on mathematics, phenomenology, and the two prior normative sciences, aesthetics and ethics. When I said that NLs are prior to logic, I meant that as a historical observation: All versions of formal logic have been designed as disciplined subsets of natural languages. I was talking about language and logic as semiotic systems. In that sense, Peirce discussed logic in the broad sense as the study of criteria of truth for any system of signs, which include natural languages as well as all kinds of notations and diagrams. Formal logics are rigidly disciplined versions of logic. That makes them useful for enabling precise definitions of the rules of inference, which preserve truth. Peirce also said that discipline is purely negative. It puts constraints on what can be said. By itself, formal logic is a deductive system that cannot find or create anything new. To introduce anything new, you need the methods of induction (generalization from particular instances) and abduction (forming hypotheses by guessing or phenomenological insight). Neither method is guaranteed to preserve truth. If you introduce new axioms by induction and abduction, they must be tested by an unending cycle of deduction and further observation. But you can never be certain that the cycle has finally converged to absolute truth. John
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