You have published four articles of mine on “truth units” in Original Philosophy, two of which I’m very grateful were “boosted” by Medium staff due to your nominations. (You have commented on or clapped for a few others and have perhaps read others beyond that.)

This piece of yours is the most clear and concise summation of Wittgenstein’s philosophy I think I’ve ever read. It captures in an 11-minute read the essence of several books I’ve read on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, plus what I got out of close readings of Wittgenstein’s books, particularly including Philosophical Investigations.

Your discussion of language games in this piece connected and illuminated in so many ways with what I’ve been struggling to articulate in those truth units articles, as I’ll try to delineate here.

The point of departure for truth units is how our language games when we’re talking about truth are remarkably uncommunicative, given how central truth is in so many forms of life, and how harmful and destructive it can be when we fail to communicate.

Specifically, language games about truth include words like subjective, objective, fact, opinion, perception, reality, etc, not to mention phrases like “my truth” and “the truth.” The family resemblance among these words is they are all about justifiability. However, what people mean in using these words is all over the map, especially given that what they mean even to just one person changes from context to context.

In this light, truth fits Wittgenstein’s analogy of the beetle in the box. Because the meaning of truth cancels out so much, truth is a label we give to some things (usually “propositions”) and not others, but nobody quite knows what the label means, even at a conversational level sometimes. This is a problem that goes back to Socrates, as Burton Voorhes noted in his comment: “a similarity between Wittgenstein's argument against fixed definitions and some of the Socratic dialogues that end without finding a fixed definition.”

Truth units tries to solve this problem by acknowledging what you say in the third paragraph under “Word Games”: “an exact definiti0n is [not] possible.” Rather than argue over exact definitions, truth units explains what any given label of “truth” means in terms of the experiences that caused a person to affix the “truth” label.

You used the example of a “pencil.” What is a pencil? For me, it’s an abstraction of all the things that have been called “pencils” in my experience (let’s say regular pencils). For you, it’s an abstraction of the things called “pencils” in your experience (let’s say mechanical pencils). If I hold up something I call a pencil and say “this is a pencil” you might think or say “that’s not true—that’s not a pencil.” I could get annoyed at you, or I could ask you to show me what you think is a pencil. When you show me a mechanical pencil, we can examine the two objects and we then see what makes them both pencils.

Truth units facilitate the process of tracing our definitions to experiences. Each time someone calls something a pencil, that’s an individual truth unit. When I hold up a regular pencil and I say it’s a pencil, your experience is testing (every truth unit is based on a test of some kind) what I show you against your experience. My pencil fails your test, so you tell me I’m wrong.

Wittgenstein in the Tractatus said the world was composed of “atomic facts” (or wasn’t it rather Bertrand Russell who called them “atomic”?). Truth units are like “atomic experiences”—experiences that result in you labeling something as “true.”

Each truth unit is a justified belief—justified by a specific experience or aggregate of experiences. The degree of justification translates into our qualifying what we label “true.” A lot of justification might be called a “fact” or “consensus.” A little justification might be called a “belief” or “opinion.” Ultimately, the only thing we have to justify our beliefs is our experiences and the conclusions we draw from them—all that happens to us, and in us, after we are thrown into the world. When something is a fact to one and opinion to another, and a resolution is not at hand, the respectful, Socratic approach is to resolve the argument through reviewing truth units.