---
# System prepended metadata

title: 'Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary'

---

# Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary

Notable Quotes 
> "What goes without saying?" 

> "But why do explanations come to an end, and so suddenly? It helps to know that Wittgenstein thinks that an "explanation serves to remove or prevent a misunderstanding––one, that is , that would arise if not for the explanation, but not every misunderstanding that I can imagine" An explanation is meant to clear up a specific problem, not every conceivable problem. But if this is what an explanation is, then no explanation would every satisfy the interlocuter, for what he wants to know is how words like "red" and "five" can have meaning at all, quite outside any specific context of use. Moreover, explanations are given in words. They are useless to someone who hasn't already learned the language." 

> "The distinction between training and explaining is crucial. Training is constant practice; explaining is giving reasons. Augustine underestimates how much we have to leearn in order to learn to do the simplest things -- naming, explaining -- with language". 

Issues of Translation - language of experience i.e.e bullefighting 

> "What it takes to learn bullfighting language is exactly what it takes to learn any language, including our first language. It takes training: training of our attention as much as of our vocabulary and syntax. " 

> "We don't just learn to speak, we learn to speak together, which means that to learn to speak is also to learn to recognize kindred spirits, or to discover that our passions for certain things doom us to isolation" 

> "Wittgenstein's insistence on use makes his vision of language profoundly different from all kinds of "Augustinian" views of language. On one Augustinian view, words ism[ly have a given meaning, and to use a wod is to inssert that pre-exisitng meaning in a new contxt. The context may perhaps shape and stretch the meaning a little, but that's all. This view takes for granted that the meaning is something other than the word. The perennial problem for this kidn of view of language is to figure out how to connect the meaning to the word, for now the word itself becomes an empty shell (this is whre theories of the "mark", or the "empty signifier" takes off) and the meaning something separate from that sell-- a thing, a psychological process, a concept or a signified, difference, iterability. "

"that's how it is"  - law of nature 

> We cling to the idea that the meaning must be separate from the word. 

> Wittgenstein's distinction between dead signs (sounds, ink-marks) and living signs (signs in use) may look like Saussure's famous distinction between signifier and signified, but Wittgenstein's point is existential, not formal. 

> Wittgenstein begins Philosophical Investigations by stressing that we can't understand words or sentences unless we place them in a context of significant use. This is why he begins by showing us language at work in simple practices. 
> 
> Dictionary definitions presuppose use. 
>
> "The meaning of a word is its use in the language" 