Now one might
say || suggest that giving reasons in this way
for
54.
laying their bets
certainly presupposes that they have observed causal connections between
the result of a fight, say, and certain features of the bodies of the
fighters, or of their training.
But this is an assumption which, whether reasonable or not, I certainly
have not made in the description of our case.
(Nor have I made the assumption that the bettors give reasons for
their reasons.)
We should in a case like that just described not be surprised if
the language of the tribe contained what we should call expressions of
degrees of belief, conviction, certainty.
These expressions we could imagine to consist in the use of a
particular word spoken with different intonations, or a series of
words.
(I am not thinking however of the use of a scale of
probabilities.) ‒ ‒
It is also easy to imagine that the people of our tribe accompany their
betting by verbal expressions which we translate into, “I
believe that so-and-so
can beat so-and-so in
wrestling”, etc.
60). Imagine in a similar way
conjectures being made as to whether a certain load of
gunpowder will be sufficient to blast a certain rock,
and the conjecture to be expressed in a phrase of the form,
“This quantity of gunpowder can blast this
rock”.
61). Compare with 60) the
case in which the expression, “I shall be able to lift this
weight”, is used as an abbreviation for the conjecture,
“My hand holding this weight will rise if I go through the
process (experience) of ‘making an effort to lift
it’”.
In the last two cases the word “can” characterized
what we should call the expression of a conjecture.
(Of course
55.
I don't mean that we
call the sentence a conjecture because it contains the word
“can”; but in calling a sentence a conjecture we
referred to the r
ole which the sentence played in the
language-game; and we translate a word our tribe uses by
“can” if “can” is the word we should
use under the circumstances described).
Now it is clear that the use of “can” in 59),
60), 61) is closely related to the use of “can”
in 46) to 49); differing, however in this, that in 46) to
49) the sentences saying that something
could || can happen were not expressions of
conjecture.
Now one might object to this by saying: Surely we are only
willing to use the word “can” in such cases as 46) to
49) because it is reasonable to conjecture in these cases what a
man will do in the future from the tests he has passed or from the state
he is in.