Could it be that logic just "is"?

This isn't what Wittgenstein means: form of life is a lot bigger. It's communal life and practice, so it would mean things like religious community, culture, and language.

Right, but that doesn't tell us anything about the tree except as it relates to these professions within our communal form of life. All we can do is analyze the tree as it relates to our form of life: grammar, for Wittgenstein (and this is pretty much straight out of the Investigations) tells us what kind of thing anything is. To know what a thing is, we figure out what place it has in language.

And according to their philosophy, they are well within theirs to try and unravel the conceptual confusions that led you to ask it.

Part of this is also the attack on conceptions of reality. Interesting Wittgensteinians are usually inconsistent because Wittgenstein was opposed to interesting philosophy: he thought that if philosophy tells you something interesting or gives you new information, that it has gone off the rails and become confused, mistaking the shadows of language for the scaffolding of reality. Interesting philosophy is confused philosophy (to a certain degree, I would concur, by the way: Bishop Berkeley and Gottfried Leibniz had highly interesting philosophies that also happened to be incredibly confused).

I'll try and take that as a compliment.

 

Of course it is bigger but it also that too. If my arm hurts there are many different language games that can describe what is going on at the same time. My best friend can console me, a nuero-surgeon can talk about it, a psychologist, etc.

Sure but in the beggining of the Investigations he is talking about language games and constantly using examples where language refers to reality.

Your right. And I know you are playing devil's advocate here but I would challenge them to "unravel" this problem and the TA I gave for language itself.

Sure, Wittgenstien would disagree with Strawson to the death. But like his earlier viewpoint I think that he was inconcsistant and although he thought he ended philosophy he really just gave us a new way to investigate it. This is what Stawson is doing.

 

Unless you realize that he's thrown out referential theories of meaning. "Reality" for Wittgenstein, depends on what language-game you are playing. Reality would just be the rules by which a particular language-game is played.

 

I think that there is a difference between saying that language does not refer to reality and saying that the whole question is pointless.

 

Wittgenstein would say that reality is a function of language.

 

I don't doubt that. What we conceive of reality is purely linguistic. But I am very intrigued by Strawson's ideas that basically if we all have to think and talk about the same stuff there will be some limitaion to how we conceive of things and these general concepts that we all share are our "metaphysics".

 

That's only if you assume that all languages share a common depth-grammar.