Proper steps from is to ought

Sadly a horrendous crime against clarity was perpetrated, and I was found with the smoking gun (by myself, nonetheless). I’m thinking of my previous post, which was the product of a nimrod, a moron, and he was I.

Nothing strange with that, as everything I write is more or less deficient as far as reason goes. But this one was so ill done it doesn’t even bring my original flawed argument out in true light. In the search of brevity, I cut away steps of reason, and left was a mess. So I figured that to repair this mess I would have to spend some posts clearing my mumbling up.

As for the first point, which was the most cogently argued; the ease of finding oughts, this post shall attend to. To anyone familiar with Searle or Wittgenstein, this move would be very unsurprising. It is quite evident that our common language is full of normative statements; “anyone with the powers of reason should not concede that…”, “and now Brokowski should pass the ball to Hulot”, “I shouldn’t have done that”, and so on. One can find them in affluence in most any text, and they make perfect sense. For the meaning of words are their usages. It is unnecessary and wrong to assume there must be a – in Wittgenstein’s words – Augustinian image, an object which a word refers to. That is not how language works. (Some nouns do.)

One might ask then what the use of ‘should’ is. It is a tricky question since it is used in so many situations, surely there is a plena of such uses and thus meanings. But one can perhaps subsume them all under the vategory of conditionals involving conforming to a (language) game. If crude, still many meanings work under this heading, and those are the pertinent ones. In other words, should works to establish an if… then… situation, where the matter at hand is following rules of conduct and assumptions. In a chess game, one assumes in the spirit of game theory that both sides wish to win, and there are rules at place for arriving at that – and thus it makes sense, “he should move the queen to d3″.

One may also call this satisfying a goal.

Tsuduku.