If anything, the author could have gone into Wittgenstein more, but she did cover a lot of ground... My stab at it:
Before Wittgenstein philosophers were obsessed with the factual nature of words and tried mapping everything correctly (logically) with the natural world. Except, they were failing.
Wittgenstein came in and basically said language was never designed to represent reality, but rather is what emerges from the use cases between people. Communication is a transaction ("game" in his words), and not some mathematical or logical construct. It may have such properties, and the people and the context are all real, so reality is involved, but language is not a direct output, nor does it need to directly correlate to resist contradiction or paradox -- which are abound in philosophy.
Except, for those who speak it, language is their reality. Those who cannot overcome their own immersion can never see past their own words, which sums up much of his opposition. They are all correct in their world and in their words... except Wittgenstein was talking about how words and worlds worked.
In short, words can be arbitrary, and are constrained by the goal to communicate and transact. This exact phenomenon which Wittgenstein described as what we are doing is the phenomena England is describing as what biological systems are doing.
It's all Dissipative Adaptation, with language being the unique construct for every such system that emerges and sustains it all.
Contrast with his ideas in the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, his first great work, where he boldly (arrogantly?) claimed that all philosophical problems are pseudo-problems caused by misuse of language.
It seemed to me like the author of the article was playing a bit loose with Wittgenstein's ideas. Isn't the idea that gravity is merely a "translation" of the curvature of spacetime an example of precisely the kind of Tractatus-speak that the language game idea was meant to demolish? Or am I missing something.
The idea the author seems to try to hint at is what i would call a Functor if we were talking about Categories:
- Language games have structure
- Structures can be compared by correspondences/functions
- A particular concept in one language game therefore could be transported along such a correspondence into another language game.
- We don't have a good correspondence between the language games of biology and physics that allows us to transport "life" from biology to physics.
- Or do we!???
P.S. It occurs to me that my analogy with categories and functors is itself a transport between the language game of category theory and the language game of language games.
> It occurs to me that my analogy with categories and functors is itself a transport between the language game of category theory and the language game of language games.
Bahahahahaha! Brilliant.
If I remember my category theory correctly, wouldn't this mean that you've discovered a Monad between the language game of category theory and the language game of language games?
If so, we could create the most incomprehensible monad tutorial yet written! Now there's a real achievement.
I also felt the Wittgenstein references "thrown" away in the article.
I guess the author tried to say that the word "life" has many meanings but in the physics "language game" its meaning is yet to be defined. In other words, defining what the word "life" means is defining what life is.
It seems that any discussion of what "life" is, inevitably stresses the language used to the breaking point. This leads one to ponder the nature of meaning itself. Philosophers certainly have a head start on that one. The scientist solution is to fortify a small subset of language before going into battle, whereas philosophers appear to grow vast fields of language in the hope that meaning survives attack by virtue of diversity.
