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anotherwaitingroom.wordpress.com
I have been trying to think lately about what use philosophy is to me now. I don't want to lose my intellectual conscience. I want to make some use of all those years I spend learning philosophy. I don't want now just to have been made a cleverer person. I want to keep in mind the importance of trying to use words correctly...I think also I ought not to forget that philosophical problems are really important problems to me.
vienna.
F. P. Ramsey once emphasized in conversation with me that logic was a 'normative science'. I do not know exactly what he had in mind, but it was doubtless closely related to what only dawned on me later: namely, that in philosophy we often compare the use of words with games and calculi which have fixed rules, but cannot say that someone who is using language must be playing such a game. --But if you say that our languages only approximate to such calculi you are standing on the very brink of a misunderstanding. For then it may look as if what we were talking about were an ideal language. As if our logic were, so to speak, a logic for a vacuum. --Whereas logic does not treat of language -- or of thought -- in the sense in which a natural science treats of a natural phenomenon, and the most that can be said is that we construct ideal languages. But here the word "ideal" is liable to mislead, for it sounds as if these languages were better, more perfect, than our everyday language; and as if it took the logician to shew people at last what a proper sentence looked like.
