One way in which Wittgenstein's interpolated remarks on 'reading' starting at §156 are special is that they juxtapose his two styles of representing language-games, designatively (like §23, referring to analytically separable parts of ordinary language) and stipulatively (like §2 or §143). The use of human (or 'other') beings as 'reading machines' considered in §157, with variant cases to follow, is undoubtedly a 'stipulated' language-game even though it's not referred to as such. Yet in §156b we have:

'Der Gebrauch dieses Worts unter den Umständen unsres gewöhnlichen Lebens ist uns natürlich ungemein wohl bekannt. Die Rolle aber, die das Wort in unserm Leben spielt, und damit das Sprachspiel, in dem wir es verwenden, wäre schwer auch nur in groben Zügen darzustellen.'

He goes on to compare a normally fluent reader (who can, it is noted, read in a variety of ways, at a glance, word-by-word, with comprehension, paying no attention, etc.) with a beginner who reads words 'indem er sie mühsam buchstabiert'. And with the contrast, an onset of philosophizing.

—So observations about a 'real language-game' are met with a description of an invented one, the reading-machines of §157. But whereas earlier games could often be described as ways of using language, using words (like tools), in order to consider the phenomenon, the language-game, at issue in this case, Wittgenstein must describe a way of utilizing, using, people who use (?) words. As if in the case of reading, we come to use words by learning to use ourselves in a peculiar way which can only occasionally come to view from where we now stand.

In his second concession in §28, Wittgenstein reverses his first: the listener could take a name for a number, rather than a number for a name. In effect, this asserts that names are to possess no special attraction for the kinds of misinterpretations under consideration in the remark. The third concession underlines the significance of this parity: for what's meant as a name could just as well be taken to be a word for a color, a racial designation, or a cardinal direction. In other words, it's not just that some special kind of word (a name) might attract certain misunderstandings of ostensive definitions, or even that any word apparently properly attachable to some ostendable thing (a name, a number, a color, etc.) might do so: even words whose significance attaches to the manner of pointing involved in defining or using them might be misunderstood because of pointing which indicates, by accident, some person rather than the 'nothing' 'that way' of a direction. It's not (proper) names as such, it's not things as such: it's the overlap between language-games.

Or Bach at night too.

Bach in the morning, Kraftwerk at night.

'Two other features of Frege's logical notation provide further grounds for calling the standard reading into doubt. First, it includes a sign, the judgment stroke, to distinguish those judgeable contents that are acknowledged to be true from those that are not. Such a sign is needed in logic, Frege argues, because inferences can be drawn only from premises acknowledged to be true. "In presenting an inference, one must utter the premises with assertoric force, for the truth of the premises is essential to the correctness of the inference. If in representing an inference in my conceptual notation one were to leave out the judgment strokes before the premised propositions, something essential would be missing… What is essential to an inference must be counted as part of logic" (Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence 79). A judgment stroke is not, however, essential to an inference in standard quantificational logic. In our logics the truth of the premises is irrelevant to the correctness of an inference; what matters is only whether the conclusion is true on the assumption that the premises are true. Yet Frege persisted in his "error" of defending the inclusion of a judgment stroke in his logic even after Wittgenstein had pointed out that the judgment stroke has no place in logic, at least in logic as Wittgenstein understands it. Again we must ask, was Frege unaccountably blind to this point, or is his conception of logic different from the conception we inherit from Russell and Wittgenstein?'

'… der Möglichkeit, die es in unserer Sprache gibt, jeden Behauptungssatz in der Form zu schreiben »Es wird behauptet….«'

'You're not saving for a nice and shining future, you're steeling yourself against doom.'

Command lines

(I now also think that my way forward with my 'belief-in' essay has been blocked because I wasn't laying enough emphasis on 'myth' in Part Four of Claim. Not that Cavell is any help with that; but it's clear that 'living my skepticism' and 'no longer living the myth', i.e. not believing (in) it, have to be related as part of any account of Cavellian belief in others (whatever that might be). I suppose I had been trying to exclude 'myth' from my account as much as possible—thus depriving myself of a belief-mediating element of the account—just because this seemed to be condoned by Cavell's attempt to work up a form of skepticism about others that could be stated in independent terms, 'naturalized' as it were, apart from any basis in or confounding by whatever 'fragments of a myth' about others that happened to crop up. Perhaps so; but the problem as reformulated after the 'shallow' views about the depth of the soul, the depths of our denials of others, etc., have been critiqued in the initial sections of Part Four has its roots in this 'no longer living the myth' phenomenon. A related question, then, would be why, for the philosopher, belief in God or in the world's existence do not at first seem to require the same sort of interposition of a 'believable' term between believer and the object of belief.)