The transcendental level of Kant’s view is unnaturalistic, and the empirical level by itself is largely unexplanatory, but combining the two in a single scientific theory yields an attractive account: the world is logically structured; our most basic cognitive mechanisms evolved so that th... see more

These views of Kant and Wittgenstein are motivated by their respective assumptions that something is a priori–part of our knowledge of the world for Kant, the sense of our sentences (their means of representation) for Wittgenstein–but there’s no evidence that Wittgenstein follows Kant in e... see more

Like the Second Philosopher, the later Wittgenstein also rejects the priority of sense. In Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, the famous rule-following considerations suggest that our ordinary practices are sufficient to ground correct and incorrect... see more

Even a philosopher successfully acclimatized to the idea that rule-following is fully grounded in our interests, natural inclinations and abilities, and general facts about the world – even such a philosopher might balk at the suggestion that logic, too, is so grounded. After all, logic is... see more

To this point, Wittgenstein and the Second Philosopher have agreed on the sorts of facts that shape our logical norms: our interests, our natural inclinations and abilities, very general features of the world. As sketched in Chapter 2, the Second Philosopher fills in this picture with the ... see more