Family Resemblance or the Lack of Boundaries and the Distance from Exactness

[alice malice]

What's in a name?
Young Juliet knows all too well what's in a name.
She knows too, and so do we, that her love is tragic, for she must,
like Adam, the first tragic figure in the Christian World, choose
between her father, her maker, her Surname, and her lover, whose given
name is Romeo, and whose surname is Montague.

O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name.
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

Jackson Pynchon. Two surnames, one a family resemblance, the other given.

And for, not &.

Mere language games?

We speak of Dixon and of Mason. We speak of Mason and Dixon. The Mason
and Dixon Line.

Set straight that pregnant symbol, push its bulge flat under a new
moon, when the stars are brightest. stretch it before you, measure it,
cut it.

Comes the abhorred machine and slits a thin spun line



The tendency to focus on language games often misses, what to my silly
reading of the idea of the Ampersand suggests, family resemblances,
against the day, against the distances and boundaries, measured and
drawn.

The Russian, Kissinger says, Play Chess, and We Americans Play Poker.
Games, like a boy tossing ball at a wall, like basketball, like pool,
like hangman...

Considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century,
Ludwig Wittgenstein played a central, if controversial, role in
20th-century analytic philosophy. He continues to influence current
philosophical thought in topics as diverse as logic and language,
perception and intention, ethics and religion, aesthetics and culture.

It is here that Wittgenstein's rejection of general explanations, and
definitions based on sufficient and necessary conditions, is best
pronounced. Instead of these symptoms of the philosopher's “craving
for generality”, he points to ‘family resemblance’ as the more
suitable analogy for the means of connecting particular uses of the
same word. There is no reason to look, as we have done
traditionally—and dogmatically—for one, essential core in which the
meaning of a word is located and which is, therefore, common to all
uses of that word. We should, instead, travel with the word's uses
through “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and
criss-crossing” (PI 66). Family resemblance also serves to exhibit the
lack of boundaries and the distance from exactness that characterize
different uses of the same concept. Such boundaries and exactness are
the definitive traits of form—be it Platonic form, Aristotelian form,
or the general form of a proposition adumbrated in the Tractatus. It
is from such forms that applications of concepts can be deduced, but
this is precisely what Wittgenstein now eschews in favor of appeal to
similarity of a kind with family resemblance.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#Lan
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l