Words Live in Hierarchies
Here's a story about Ludwig Wittgenstein, as related by Norman Malcolm, his student and friend. It's from Malcolm's book Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (1958). On one walk he "gave" to me each tree that we passed, with the reservation that I was not to cut it down or do anything to it, or prevent the previous owners from doing anything to it: with those reservations it was henceforth mine. What is this curious recollection doing here? To see my reason, note what Wittgenstein did: to make a point, he changed some natural everyday words. He didn't merely redefine them; he obliterated them. If you give someone something with all those conditions, then you clearly haven't given it at all, have you? If you were the "recipient" under those conditions, you could not really claim that the trees were "yours." Concepts formed in a hierarchical context; that is, they depend logically on other concepts and fit into a structure. To understand some c