Understanding Human Action

Wittgenstein has said, "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him" (1958). The point of this rather cryptic comment is undoubtedly Wittgenstein's contention that language or "language games" are embedded in what he termed "forms of life." That is, we are able to understand each other not just because we share common knowledge about the syntactic and semantic conventions for the use of words, but also because we share common knowledge about the forms of life or social reality within which we live and act. Wittgenstein's remarkable lion would presumably not share our social reality nor we have knowledge of the lion's social reality. Consequently, Wittgenstein would contend that this lion's exhibition of speech would not result in our being able to communicate with him nor he with us.

• Publication year

  1975

• Venue

  Theoretical Issues In Natural Language Processing

• Publication date

  1975-06-10

• Fields of study

  Philosophy, Computer Science, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3115/980190.980240
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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