Philosophical Investigations, Volume 44, Issue 4, Page 372-402, October 2021.

The aim of this paper is to show that a corollary of resolute readings of Wittgenstein’s conception of nonsense cannot be sustained. First, I describe the corollary. Next, I point out the relevance to it of Wittgenstein’s discussion of family resemblance concepts. Then, I survey some typical uses of nonsense to see what they bring to an ordinary language treatment of the word “nonsense” and its relatives. I will subsequently consider the objection, on behalf of a resolute reading, that “nonsense” (...) is a term of philosophical criticism. Finally, I conclude that resolute readings have not sufficiently accounted for how nonsense behaves in our language; they have failed to heed Wittgenstein’s warning: “don’t think, but look!”. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s writings and lectures during the first half of the 1930s play a crucial role in any interpretation of the relationship between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations . G. E. Moore’s notes of Wittgenstein’s Cambridge lectures, 1930-1933, offer us a remarkably careful and conscientious record of what Wittgenstein said at the time, and are much more detailed and reliable than previously published notes from those lectures. The co-authors are currently editing these notes of Wittgenstein’s lectures for a book to (...) be published by Cambridge University Press. We describe the materials that make up Moore’s notes, explain their unique value, review the principal editorial challenges that these materials present, and provide a brief outline of our editorial project. (shrink)

La discussion sur le langage privé que l’on trouve dans les Recherchesphilosophiques a été écrite entre 1937 et 1945, après que les 190 premières remarques de la partie I du livre eurent presque atteint leur forme finale. Les textes post-1936 sur le langage privé constituent un nouveau départ, dans sa lettre et son esprit, par rapport au matériau d’avant 1936.Néanmoins, entre 1929 et 1936, Wittgenstein s’est penché à plusieurs reprises sur l’idée d’un langage « que moi seul peux comprendre ». (...) Un volet de cette question qui, lui, est abordé directement dans les Recherches, c’est l’idée que « si j’appliquais le mot “douleur” uniquement à ce que j’ai nommé jusqu’ici “ma douleur”, et les autres “la douleur de L.W.”, je ne ferais ainsi aucun tort aux autres, si toutefois l’on avait prévu une notation qui d’une façon ou d’une autre, permettrait de pallier l’absence du mot “douleur” dans d’autres combinaisons ». Cependant, la discussion de cette question dans les Recherches est beaucoup plus brève que dans les textes d’avant 1936. J’examine le rapport entre ce § 403 des Recherches d’un côté, et de l’autre côté les textes des cahiers de 1929 et les Remarques philosophiques , en retraçant le développement initial de cette argumentation et en explorant les principales lignes de continuité et de discontinuité dans le traitement que Wittgenstein réserve à la question du langage privé.The discussion of private language in the Investigations was written between 1937 and 1945, after the first 190 remarks of Part I of the book had almost reached their final form. The post-1936 writing on private language represents a fresh start, both in wording and in conception, on the pre-1936 material.Nevertheless, Wittgenstein did repeatedly discuss the idea of a language which “only I myself can understand” during 1929-36. One strand in this discussion that is directly taken up in the Investigations is the idea that “If I were to reserve the word ‘pain’ solely for what I had hitherto called ‘my pain”, and others “L.W.’s pain,” I should do other people no injustice, so long as a notation were provided in which the loss of the word ‘pain’ in other connexions were somehow supplied.” However, the discussion of this topic in the Investigations is much briefer than in the pre-1936 writing. I look at the relationship between §403 and texts from the 1929 notebooks and the Philosophical Remarks, assembled in the spring of 1930, mapping out the earlier development of this line of argument and exploring the principal continuities and discontinuities in Wittgenstein’s treatment of private language. (shrink)

Many authors have identified a link between later Wittgenstein and enactivism. But few have also recognised how Wittgenstein may in fact challenge enactivist approaches. In this paper, I consider one such challenge. For example, Wittgenstein is well known for his discussion of seeing-as, most famously through his use of Jastrow’s ambiguous duck-rabbit picture. Seen one way, the picture looks like a duck. Seen another way, the picture looks like a rabbit. Drawing on some of Wittgenstein’s remarks about seeing-as, I show (...) how Wittgenstein poses a challenge for proponents of Sensorimotor Enactivism, like O’Regan and Noë, namely to provide a sensorimotor framework within which seeing-as can be explained. I claim that if these proponents want to address this challenge, then they should endorse what I call Sensorimotor Identification, according to which visual experiences can be identified with what agents do. (shrink)

Extended mind remains a provocative approach to cognition and mentality. However, both those for and against this approach have tacitly accepted that cognition or mentality can be understood in terms of those sub personal processes ongoing during some task. I label this a process view of cognition (PV). Using Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach, I argue that proponents of extended mind should reject PV and instead endorse a ‘wide view’ of mentality. This wide view clarifies why the hypothesis of extended mind (HEM) (...) is incoherent. However, this view also indicates why the hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) could be true. (shrink)

From a Wittgensteinian point of view, my goal is to argue against the idea that teaching critical thinking should have as one of its aims the possibility of changing or adapting our deeply held beliefs. As pointed out by the Austrian philosopher in On Certainty, we have a world-picture which is neither true nor false, but above all, ‘it is the substratum of all my enquiring and asserting’. Besides that, in his remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, Wittgenstein insists on the (...) idea that different communities have their own rituals that express ways of acting, which become crystallized in their customs and institutions, similar to the magical rituals described by Frazer. The degree of similarity among them is greater than we suspect, and what interested Wittgenstein was to understand how we see things by looking for the links between the various ritualistic events. Based on these remarks, I argue that, if our deeply held beliefs are a source of necessity, instead of aiming to change/adapt them, teaching critical thinking should—by showing the links between diverse cultures—essentially avoid employing them in a dogmatic way, since our own deeply held beliefs could have been different ones. (shrink)

In his diaries from the beginning of the 1930s, Ludwig Wittgenstein comments extensively both on Søren Kierkegaard's view of philosophical method and on his view of love. The aim of this article is to show how Wittgenstein's reflections on Kierkegaard's view of love reveal a fundamental difference between the two thinkers' views of philosophical method, a difference in their view of the role of the reader of and partner in doing philosophy, between Kierkegaard's indirect communication to the reader and Wittgenstein's (...) dialogical engagement with the reader. The article opens with a presentation of substantial similarities between Wittgenstein's and Kierkegaard's conceptions of philosophy. After this, I present an account of Kierkegaard's view of love and marriage, an understanding of which is necessary in order to understand Wittgenstein's reservations towards Kierkegaard. This in turn leads me to the main investigation that shows how a difference in Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein's views on love connects to a fundamental difference in their views of philosophy. This difference between the two thinkers will finally be elucidated through the understanding of love developed by Stanley Cavell in his work on the so‐called Hollywood remarriage comedies. (shrink)

The "standard account" of Wittgenstein’s relations with the Vienna Circle is that the early Wittgenstein was a principal source and inspiration for the Circle’s positivistic and scientific philosophy, while the later Wittgenstein was deeply opposed to the logical empiricist project of articulating a "scientific conception of the world." However, this telegraphic summary is at best only half-true and at worst deeply misleading. For it prevents us appreciating the fluidity and protean character of their philosophical dialogue. In retrospectively attributing clear-cut positions (...) to Wittgenstein and his interlocutors, it is very easy to read back our current understanding of familiar distinctions into a time when those terms were used in a much more open-ended way. The paper aims to to provide a broader perspective on this debate, starting from the protagonists’ understanding of their respective positions. Too often, the programmatic statements about the nature of their work that are repeated in manifestoes, introductions, and elementary textbooks have occupied center stage in the subsequent secondary literature. Consequently, I focus on a detailed examination of a turning point in their relationship. That turning point is Wittgenstein's charge, in the summer of 1932, that a recently published paper of Carnap's, "Physicalistic Language as the Universal Language of Science", made such extensive and unacknowledged use of Wittgenstein's own ideas that Wittgenstein would, as he put it in a letter to Schlick, "soon be in a situation where my own work shall be considered merely as a reheated version or plagiarism of Carnap’s." While the leading parties in this dispute shared a basic commitment to the primacy of physicalistic language, and the view that all significant languages are translatable, there was a remarkable lack of mutual understanding between them, and deep disagreement about the nature of the doctrines they disputed. Three quarters of a century later, we are so much more conscious of the differences that separated them than the points on which they agreed that it takes an effort of historical reconstruction to appreciate why Wittgenstein once feared that his own work would be regarded as a pale shadow of Carnap’s. (shrink)

There are historically three main trends in understanding Wittgenstein's Tractatus. The first is the interpretation offered by the Vienna Circle. They read Wittgenstein as arguing that neither metaphysical nor normative propositions have any cognitive meaning, and thus are to be considered nonsense. This interpretation understands Wittgenstein as setting the limits of sense, and prescribing that nothing of substantive philosophical importance lies beyond that line. The second way of reading the Tractatus, which has became popular since the 1950s, is the interpretation (...) which most currently accept as the early Wittgenstein's view; for this reason I refer to it as the 'standard reading.' According to this interpretation, Wittgenstein did not consider metaphysical and ethical discourse as nonsense. Rather, relying upon the distinction between saying [sagen] and showing [zeigen], he meant that these truths cannot be uttered, but instead are only shown. The standard reading can perhaps be best understood in contrast with the third interpretation, dubbed the "resolute reading." The resolute reading takes seriously Wittgenstein's remark at 6.54 that "[m]y propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as nonsense [unsinnig]." According to the resolute interpretation, Wittgenstein is not advancing a series of philosophical theses in the Tractatus. Rejecting the distinction characteristic of standard readings, between propositions without sense [sinnlos] and just plain nonsense [unsinnig], these interpreters read Wittgenstein as treating ethical and metaphysical inquiry, as well as a bulk of the doctrines in the text, as nonsense. To them, Wittgenstein did not intend to put forth any theses in the the text. Instead his methodology is therapeutic, similar to the later philosophy. It In this essay I explain each interpretation, and evaluate them in terms of textual and philosophical viability. I conclude by arguing that the biases which exist in the tradition of analytic philosophy substantively temper the interpretation of historical texts, which ultimately leads to the fundamental distinction between these three interpretations. (shrink)

This paper comes in three parts. In the first part, I explore the question of the relation between the philosophies of the early and the later Wittgenstein as they are standardly distinguished, with the aim of raising some questions about whether that standard distinction might not obstruct our view of certain significant aspects of the development of Wittgenstein’s thought. In the second part, drawing on the work of Marie McGinn and Warren Goldfarb, I distinguish two senses in which these two (...) commentators have been moved to call upon the expression ‘piecemeal’ in their respective attempts to characterize an important feature of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophical method. In the third part, I draw upon this distinction to help bring into focus a significant shift in Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophical method which occurs fully within the so-called “later” period—a shift which has in no small part remained invisible due to the manner in which the opposition between an early and a later Wittgenstein has hitherto been conceived. (shrink)