Philosophical Investigations 450-550

I'm combining these two sections of 50 because I didn't highlight much. I challenge all of you to post a response to number 510. I'd be very interested to hear what any and/or all of you would say.

464. My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

494. I want to say: It is primarily the apparatus of our ordinary language, of our word-language, that we call language; and then other things by analogy or comparability with this.

496. Grammar does not tell us how language must be constructed in order to fulfil its purpose, in order to have such-and-such an effect on human beings. It only describes and in no way explains the use of signs.

510. Make the following experiment: say "It's cold here" and mean "It's warm here". Can you do it?--And what are you doing as you do it? And is there only one way of doing it?

518. Socrates to Theaetetus: "And if someone thinks mustn't he think something?" --Th: "Yes, he must."--Soc.: "And if he thinks something, mustn't it be something real?"--Th.: "Apparently."
And mustn't someone who is painting be painting something--and someone who is painting something be painting something real!--Well, tell me what the object of painting is: the picture of a man (e.g.), or the man that the picture portrays?

523. I should like to say "What the picture tells me is itself." That is, its telling me something consists in its own structure, in its own lines and colours. (What would it mean to say "What this musical them tells me is itself?)

524. Don't take it as a matter of course, but as a remarkable fact, that pictures and fictitious narratives give us pleasure, occupy our minds.
("Don't take it as a matter of course" means: find it surprising, as you do some things which disturb you. Then the puzzling aspect of the latter will disappear, by your accepting this fact as you do the other.)
((The transition from patent nonsense to something which is disguised nonsense.))

528. It would be possible to imagine people who had something quite unlike a language: a play of sounds, without vocabulary or grammar. ('Speaking with tongues.')
[W says this right after saying that the parallel between understanding a sentence and understanding a musical theme is more alike than we think. This might interest you musicians out there.]

531. [And here is where the Perloff's notion of irreplaceable language, the title of my blog, comes in.] We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other. (Any more than one musical theme can be replaced by another.)
In the one case the thought in the sentence is osmething common to different sentences; in the other, something that is expressed only by these words in these positions. (Understanding a poem.)

534. [W repeats from earlier:] A multitude of familiar paths lead off from these words in every direction.

And a thinking problem of my own that I contemplated on my trip: How do we interpret, listen to, and actually hear differently when words we hear come from someone that we "trust."