An account of the norms of assertion is proposed which is supported by the same considerations that motivate the familiar knowledge account of those norms, but does not have a problematic consequence of the latter. This alternative account is defended against others to be found in the literature, and some larger epistemological issues it raises are considered briefly.

So argues John Koethe, in contrast to the standard view that Wittgenstein's earlier and later philosophical positions are sharply opposed.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical work is informed throughout by a particular broad theme: that the semantic and mentalistic attributes of language and human life are shown by verbal and nonverbal conduct, but that they resist incorporation into the domain of the straightforwardly factual. So argues John Koethe, in contrast to the standard view that Wittgenstein's earlier and later philosophical positions are sharply opposed. According to the received view, Wittgenstein's thinking underwent a radical transformation after the Tractatus, leading him to abandon classical (...) realism and to develop an alternative semantics based on the notion of warranted assertability. Koethe maintains that the thesis that semantic claims are not made true by any facts whatsoever, which was a central part of Wittgenstein's early theory of elementary propositions, was one he continued to develop in his later writings, and that it is perfectly compatible with classical realism. In making his case for the essential continuity of Wittgenstein's thought, Koethe ranges over the entire corpus of the philosopher's writing, and concludes by pointing out connections between Wittgenstein's views and those of several contemporary philosophers, including Nagel, Dennett, Davidson, and Dummett. (shrink)

Hilary putnam has tried to refute the realist doctrine that the operational verification of a theory never logically precludes its objective falsity by means of an argument involving model-theoretic considerations. in this paper it is first shown that this argument does not work if the theory in question is open to revision. next it is argued that a realist need not and should not admit the notion of the sort of unrevisable, ideal theory required for the purposes of putnam's argument.

It is customary to divide Wittgenstein’s work into two broad phases, the first culminating in the Tractatus, and the second comprising the writings that began upon his return to philosophy in 1929 and culminating in the Investigations. It is also commonly assumed that the Tractatus propounds various doctrines concerning language and representation, doctrines which are repudiated in the later work, and often criticized explicitly. One problem with this view of the Trac- tatus is Wittgenstein’s claim in 6.54 that its propositions (...) are “nonsensical,”2 a claim which on its face is at odds with the idea that they present substantive philosophical theories. The usual way of handling this problem is to assume that the claim is not to be taken literally, that the sentences of the Tractatus are not nonsense in the sense of mere gibberish, but are intended somehow to engender in the attentive reader a grasp of certain important aspects of the relationship between language and the world. Beginning with her seminal paper “Throwing Away the Ladder,” Cora Diamond has proposed reading the Tractatus in a way that takes literally 6.54’s claim of the book’s nonsensicality, and rejects the idea that its sentences represent a kind of elevated nonsense intended to.. (shrink)

Scepticism, Knowledge, and Forms of Reasoning is an attempt to resolve how best to respond to such vexing arguments, a matter on which there is no consensus ...

Although the literature on Wittgenstein's notion of criteria is extensive, it seems unsatisfactory. Most interpretations of criteria not only misrepresent Wittgenstein; more importantly, they misconstrue the relation between a mental state and the behavior characteristic of that state. If by “criteria” Wittgenstein meant what he has been taken to mean, it is unlikely that any mental states have criteria. In this paper I shall argue that a proper interpretation of Wittgenstein's notion provides an account of the relation between some mental (...) states and the behavior characteristic of them which is at least approximately correct.According to current interpretations of criteria the relation between a form of behavior C and the mental state of which it is a criterion, S, is such that the proposition “A person displaying C is in S” is either a necessary truth, known a priori to be true, or “true in virtue of a definition, convention, or rule of language.”. (shrink)

The title of Sketches of Landscapes is drawn from the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, in which Wittgenstein characterizes his remarks as “a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings.” The invocation of Wittgenstein is meant to suggest the character of the distinctive methodology Stroll intends to apply to a number of the central issues in metaphysics and epistemology, a methodology he calls “philosophy by example.” He describes it as a (...) piecemeal approach emphasizing “specific cases, episodes, scenarios, and contexts”, and it seems to consist largely in opposing overarching philosophical theories and generalizations with concrete examples and instances of common usage that are at odds with them. Despite Stroll’s often-repeated claims of novelty, the methodology of Sketches of Landscapes does not differ significantly from the standard practice of criticizing philosophers’ distinctions, positions, and arguments by adducing counterexamples to the former and identifying fallacies in the latter. The book is best seen not as a unified illustration of a distinctive philosophical method, but as seven self-contained essays on a number of familiar issues. The first chapter discusses skepticism, while the next two criticize Putnam’s views on meaning and reference. The fourth chapter sketches a novel linguistic theory and brings it to bear on Plato’s theory of forms. The final three chapters discuss reference and fiction, holism, and direct and indirect realism about perception. I shall comment on Stroll’s discussions of the first three of these topics. (shrink)

According to a classical view in the philosophy of language, the reference of a term is determined by a property of the term which supervenes on the history of its use. A contrasting view is that a term's reference is determined by how it is properly interpreted, in accordance with certain constraints or conditions of adequacy on interpretations. Causal theories of reference of the sort associated with Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke and Michael Devitt are versions of the first view, while (...) defenders of determination by interpretation theories include Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett and John Haugeland. I use a variant of Putnam's Twin Earth thought experiment to argue against the first view generally, and causal theories of reference in particular, then go on to argue that properly-formulated version of the principle of charity can account for the intuitions that seem to support causal theories. Finally, I apply my version of interpretationism to the problem of reference to abstract objects and compare it with some of Wittgenstein's and Quine's views about language. (shrink)

A striking fact of our current literary culture is the estrangement between poets and critics and reviewers of contemporary poetry on the one hand, and proponents of that loosely defined set of doctrines, methodologies, and interests that goes by the name of “theory” on the other. There are individual exceptions to this on both sides, and one can find counterexamples to every generalization I shall suggest here. Nevertheless, anyone familiar with the climates of opinion to be found in English and (...) philosophy departments, poetry workshops and critical symposia, creative writing and cultural studies programs, and the ­ nonacademic counterparts of these—especially among people in their twenties and thirties—has to acknowledge the lack of acquaintance and interest—and often even the disdain and contempt—that characterizes the relations between poets and those engaged in the kind of high-level, quasi-philosophical reflective activity that literature, and poetry in particular, used to occasion. Illustrations are easy to come by. References to modern poetry by younger theorists are typically confined to the high modernists and to poets canonized twenty or thirty years ago in books like Donald Allen’s New American Poetry or Richard Howard’s Alone with American; and their rare allusions to the poetry of their contemporaries often betray a striking lack of familiarity and taste. Conversely, the fact that eighty years after Ezra Pound called for the breaking of everything breakable, a poet as intelligent and conceptually ambitious as Jorie Graham should title a book The End of Beauty, and have the theoretical outlook evoked by the title hailed as radical by as informed a critic as Helen Vendler, surely suggests that the level of reflective awareness in the poetry community is not what it might be.2 1. Quoted in Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered—An Oral Biography , p. 43.2. See Helen Vendler, “Married to Hurry and Grim Song,” The New Yorker, 27 July 1987, pp. 74-77. John Koethe is professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. His most recent book of poetry is The Late Wisconsin Spring. (shrink)

Essays by a prize-winning poet that explore the intersection of poetry and philosophy.

As part of an exchange of views on what Jan Zwicky calls “lyric philosophy,” this contribution suggests a way of understanding it that brings out affinities between it and the standard discursive model of philosophy with which she is dissatisfied. Good discursive philosophy is based on perplexity and plausibility: on finding that protophilosophical experiences give rise to philosophical puzzlement, and then finding that some ways of responding to such puzzlement are more compelling than others. This philosophical mode involves the same (...) conceptual “gestalt” that Zwicky identifies with lyric philosophy: being struck by how certain combinations of experiences and ideas feel inherently problematic and grasping how certain combinations of ideas that attempt to address these problems hang together while others do not. Moreover, the thought and language in which discursive philosophical reflection is conducted are frequently affective and couched in deeply metaphorical terms. Thus, this essay concludes, the mode of making sense that is supposed to distinguish lyric philosophy from its discursive counterpart is one that is central to the discursive model of philosophy as well. (shrink)

In Wittgenstein’s Thought in Transition Dale Jacquette offers a unified account of the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations, linked by a close reading of the 1929 paper “Some Remarks on Logical Form,” which Wittgenstein withdrew from publication and in which he tried to resolve a difficulty for the Tractatus’ account of incompatibility involving propositions about colors. Jacquette sees this paper as the key to understanding Wittgenstein’s rejection of the main theses of the Tractatus and the emergence of his later views. (...) His accounts of Wittgenstein’s early and later views—particularly the former—are of some interest, emphasizing aspects of them often glossed over by other commentators. He indicates at the outset that to facilitate laying out his own reading of the two major texts, he will give little attention to the secondary literature on Wittgenstein. Given the extent of that literature this is a defensible strategy; but in some areas it leads to questions about Jacquette’s own views which discussion of other treatments of the topic at hand would have helped resolve. (shrink)