Is Socio-Linguistic Anticipation Anti-Intellectualism?

A while back, I was reading Wittgenstein’s notion of “language games” and how words are defined according to how they’re used.

Usage is subjective however, so words can be defined in many ways.

Therefore, when people use words, they can mean different things.

However, if people try to anticipate the usage of other people’s words to figure out what they really mean, and if people try to react to that word usage in order to get what they want out of people, it can dilute the value of discussion, conversation, and/or debate tremendously since people will be dishonest in pursuit of their own self-interests as well as dismissive of complex concepts when their self-interests are content with simple concepts.

Therefore, isn’t socio-linguistic anticipation anti-intellectual? When we anticipate what other people are “really getting at” through their usage of words, are we becoming closeminded to things other than what we want?

I’m not really getting what you mean by ‘anticipate’. To me, to anticipate something is to predict it. As in, make a[n educated] guess about what it will be before hand.

So, if that is what you mean, I don’t get it. People are guessing what other people are going to say, and that’s anti-intellectual? Why are people guessing what other people are going to say?

Are you sure ‘anticipate’ is the word you’re looking for?

Wittgenstein isn’t the end all be all of philosophy of language. Most of what he said has been revised or refuted over the years. So we don’t necessarily define words according to usage, so and “therefores” which follow that premise might not still be the case in our current understanding.

It’s that people guess the motive behind what others are trying to say.

For example, say you have an honest person who looks into the indefinite long term when discussing an issue with other people. The perspective given is unprejudiced towards any particular result, but rather looks at the process of people’s behavior in general instead of the results.

However, let’s say this honest person is discussing the issue with dishonest people who want particular results over time periods less than the indefinite long term. Their perspectives are prejudiced towards particular results.

Therefore, the dishonest people anticipate what the honest person is really saying, so rather than being intellectual, they deliberately play word games in order to skew the conversation towards getting the results they want by overloading others’ attention spans. They understand what the honest indefinitely long term person is saying, but they anticipate that the results aren’t what they want, so the usage of words gets twisted instead and becomes closeminded towards their self-interested results.

To be clear, I’m not saying anti-intellectualism is unstrategic. I’m just saying strategic thinking isn’t necessarily intellectual.

Daktoria, I’m sorry to say that I don’t think I can continue this conversation, as I very rarely understand what you’re saying. You word your ideas in a way that is very alien and inaccessible to me.

I remember this being the case in previous discussions with you, now that it’s come up again. Not that it’s any fault of your own – though, idk, it may be; I think my inability to parse your sentences is shared by quite a few here, and you may actually benefit from attempting to word your ideas in a way that people can get what you mean.

I’m sorry for starting a conversation and ending it so abruptly like this. I just truly have a very hard time parsing your writings.

I was just about to post a reply, where yours came in Flanell J.

Dactoria may be implying that motives and plans of actions leading toward objectives may not always lay on the same plane. When she says that strategic thinking may be, but is not necessarily anti intellectual, she is admitting to at least a possibility, that dishonest people may try to invalidate other’s responses, by a sort of pre-frontal attack.

 If the question of honesty comes up, during the course of a conversation, and the person, whose integrity is at question, tries to come up with a defense, such as, 'well, you know, you have never knew me to be dishonest" the other may pre figure this response, and undermine it by saying beforehand,  something like," I always thought of you as an honest person"

Now, if that ‘honest’ person would try to counter with ‘Yes, but you haven’t known me that long’, then he would expose himself to attack on another front, like " what does the length of time of knowing someone have to do with one’s person’s ability of covering up lies? ". So the accused finds himself in a linguistic trap, knotted up like Laing, a follower of Wittgensteins language theory would suggest.

It seems , strategic thinking may or may not be useful  with an intellectual interpretation of what it takes to find sincerity, since as Smears suggested, stategy can be manipulated by looking at it from various perspectives. As a consequence, the uselessness of such a device tends to be associated with  the sense, that primarily it is dishonest people would use it, knowing well, that it seems  anchored to  more  immediate gains rather than it really is:   the variences of opinions  pursuant  of longer terms goals.  The former again seems to be predicated on the notion that short term gains of the immediate gratification sort, are less helpful in attaining goals mutually, then seeking them for a singular benefit.

Which might lead, say, a person posting at a philosophy forum, to not immediately reveal the specific issue, but deal with it in either metaphorical or very abstract terms, so that people do nto focus on what they Think is their position on some issue and must be careful about what is written now.

Am I on the right track here?

Yes, you got it. :slight_smile:

Well that would be the anticipation.

In reality, someone could be posting because someone is concerned about all possible specific issues rather than being prejudiced towards some possibilities.

People aren’t always selfish. Some people post about principles because they recognize that their own issues aren’t the only issues in the world, so they’re trying to find allies who have similar issues with the same principle.