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It is very difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many lines of thought laid down — your own or other people’s, and not to get into one of the grooves. It is difficult to deviate from an old line of thought, just a little.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Zettel" 349, p. 64e
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"What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all..."
Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in an Extra-moral Sense"
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In the common words we use every day the souls of past races, the thoughts and feelings of individual men stand around us, not dead, but frozen into their attitudes like the courtiers in the garden of the Sleeping Beauty. The more common a word is and the simpler its meaning, the bolder very likely is the original thought which it contains and the more intense the intellectual or poetic effort which went to its making. Thus, the word ‘quality’ is used by most educated people every day of their lives, yet in order that we should have this simple word Plato had to make the tremendous effort (it is one of the most exhausting which man is called on to exert) of turning a vague feeling into a clear thought. He invented the new word ‘poiotes’, ‘what-ness’, as we might say, or ‘of-what-kind-ness’, and Cicero translated it by the Latin ‘qualitas’, from ‘qualis’. Language becomes a different thing for us altogether if we can make ourselves realize, can even make ourselves feel how every time the word ‘quality’ is used, say upon a label in a shop window, that creative effort made by Plato comes into play again. Nor is the acquisition such a feeling a waste of time; for once we have made it our own, it circulates like blood through the whole of the literature and life about us. It is the kiss which brings the sleeping courtiers to life.
O. Barfield — History in English Words (via ice-and-sunfire)
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Idiolects are to language-games what various balls are to ball-games in general.
That is, one can play a specific ball-game with any of a variety of different balls in the same way that one can play a particular language-game despite variation in idiolect.
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"Mind can only think about mind when language equips it with a recursive (that is, self-referential) feature-detection system."
Figments of Reality, p.xi
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"Extelligence constantly modifies and organises itself through continuing interactions with innumerable individuals. [...] The developing mind of each child interacts with extelligence by way of language, and the two-way flow between individuals and their surrounding culture changes both. [...] Thus the evolution and structure of the brain cannot be divorced from the evolution and structure of human society and its environment, the universe."
Figments of Reality, p.x
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And as, in a foreign country, I begin to understand the meaning of words through their place in a context of action, and by taking part in a communal life – in the same way an as yet imperfectly understood piece of philosophical writing discloses to me at least a certain ‘style’ – either of Spinozist, critical or phenomenological one – which is the first draft of its meaning. I begin to understand a philosophy by feeling my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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