In the sparse literature that is concerned with Wittgenstein’s views regarding children and childhood, in his later work, it is often suggested that Wittgenstein presents, or at least is committed to, a romantic notion of the child according to which children should be conceived of as innocent beings who are ontologically different from adults. In this paper I argue that Wittgenstein’s remarks do not support such an interpretation. First, I investigate the arguments for this view presented by Stanley Cavell, Yasushi (...) Maruyama, and Philip Shields. Second, I consider an anti-essentialist understanding of Wittgenstein’s concept of childhood that has been suggested in opposition to the treatment of the child as the ‘ontological other’ and argue that Wittgenstein refers to the child as intermediate link with which to state grammatical facts. In contrast to these various views, I hold, third, that the PI is committed to a strong and substantial concept of childhood. I argue for this claim on the basis of the ‘Motto’ of the PI; Wittgenstein’s reference to the philosopher Augustine; and the use of ‘primitive’. I conclude that Wittgenstein’s concept of childhood in his later works neither romanticises nor dispraises the child as the ‘ontological other’. (shrink)

References to God. Some Remarks by Wittgenstein on Religion in the Years 1949 – 51. After a brief overview of Wittgenstein's stock of remarks on the subject of religion from 1949 – 1951, this article will focus on two particular points: supposedly nonsensical conceptions of God, for instance in the context of proofs of God, definitions of the term ”God” by hinting at something. Connections between and both systematically and exegetically within the framework of Wittgenstein's remarks are made.Ich danke Anja (...) Weiberg für sehr hilfreiche Kommentare. (shrink)

This paper argues that Wittgenstein does not assimilate certainties to either linguistic norms or empirical propositions but assigns them to a liminal space between rule and experience. This liminal space is also brought into play in remarks written at the same time as those compiled in On Certainty, but attributed to different bodies of text. The paper maintains that certainties express the agreement and constancy in judgements without which – as Wittgenstein contends in his Philosophical Investigations – rule-following would not (...) be possible. It is shown that this intrinsic relation between rule-following and certainties can explain the liminal status of the latter. (shrink)

Wittgenstein and Dostoevsky both ridicule a hypostasizing and fetishizing picture of interiority: viewing sensations and intentions like discrete material objects. The symbols for this misleading view in their respective works are a beetle and a sachet containing thousand five hundred roubles. The beetle in the box passage in the Philosophical Investigations discredits a Cartesian picture of pain as akin to a thing-like entity. The sachet in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov represents Dmitry’s intention to be honourable. Dostoevsky achieves a perspicuous view (...) of entangled webs of intentions, as opposed to labelling them like object-like entities. I show that Wittgenstein’ account of first-personal thought, including intentions, is not based on the Cartesian dualism of the inner and the outer, the mind and the body. To underscore my argumentation, I refer to The Brothers Karamazov, one of Wittgenstein’s favourite novels. I especially focus on Dmitry’s sachet, which inspired Wittgenstein’s beetle in the box example. I show parallels both in content and in form of Wittgenstein’s and Dostoevsky’s approach to intention as a species of first-personal thought. (shrink)

In On Certainty, Wittgenstein conceives a novel way of dispelling skeptical doubts about our knowledge of the external world. He acknowledges that in his attempt to refute the skeptic, Moore uncovered epistemologically relevant propositions such as ‘I know that this is a hand’. But he denies that appealing to such truisms is likely to succeed in refuting skepticism–not because they cannot be doubted, but because they are not objects of knowledge in the first place. Rather than refuting skepticism about the (...) external world, Moore’s truisms form the background against which claims to knowledge and doubt are reasonable, meaningful, or justified. By incorporating such conditions for doubt, Wittgenstein seems to provide an effective rationale against skepticism: not only do we lack reasons for certain doubts about our knowledge of the external world, but those doubts also presuppose that much of what we take to know is exempt from them. This paper critically examines the claim that doubt requires reasons and uses Descartes’ famous dream argument as an example to show that not every doubt can be easily dispelled by invoking it. (shrink)

Reality and Appearance. At the beginning of On Certainty, as its second entry, Wittgenstein makes a remark according to which the fact that something appears to me, or to all of us, to be so and so does not entail the fact that it is so and so. This looks like a straightforward philosophical claim made by Wittgenstein. This claim fits into a family of views on the nature of the relation between appearance and reality which in turn is related (...) to a family of views concerning the nature of belief, knowledge and certainty. However, it is common experience with Wittgenstein’s remarks that what appears to be a straightforward philosophical claim is actually no such thing. The essay follows that experience to a point where it becomes unclear what the remark about appearance and reality could possibly be if not a philosophical claim. (shrink)

Wittgenstein talks in his Philosophical Investigations of a pupil engaging in a repetitive series continuation who suddenly begins to apply a different rule than the one instructed to him. This hypothetical example has been interpreted by a number of philosophers to indicate either a skeptical attitude towards rules and their application, an implicit need of knowledge and understanding of a rule accessible to those engaged in a given practice, or a certain normativity that guides our actions but is not cognitive, (...) but processual in nature. I wish to support and extend Ginsborg’s account of primitive normativity from a novel perspective in a twofold manner: 1) by describing the mechanism of primitive normativity via Kant’s concept of aesthetical and epistemic pleasure and displeasure; 2) by applying the conceptual pair of expected and unexpected uncertainty from adaptive learning theories, which describe the fluctuation of learning rates under uncertain circumstances.I am grateful to Dr. Romain Ligneul's help in better understanding the subtleties of this conceptual pair. (shrink)

One way of identifying the beginning of the Investigations is by deciding to regard remark 1, and hence neither the motto nor the Preface but the famous quotation from Augustine, as the real starting point of Wittgenstein’s reflections as developed in this book. One point implicit in this decision is that the notion of a language-game is placed in the foreground of Wittgenstein’s discussion. In a way, the language-game of the builders is Wittgenstein’s paradigm of a language-game – but why (...) is it treated differently from the shopkeeper scene in the sense that the latter is not given a separate number? This question appears particularly urgent in view of the fact that in earlier manuscript versions of the Investigations Wittgenstein did allot a separate number to the shopkeeper scene. Towards the end of this paper I make an attempt to answer that question. But in order to get down to this a number of additional questions are raised focussing on Wittgenstein’s use of central terms like “game”, “operate”, “sample” and drawing on distinctions elaborated in the literature, such as Benacerraf’s distinction between “transitive” and “intransitive” kinds of counting. This reading of the beginning of the Investigations is impregnated with the conviction that later parts of the book can fruitfully be seen as growing out of the remarks immediately following the quotation from Augustine. (shrink)

“Our task is merely to be just”: Courtroom Scenarios in Wittgenstein’s Last Writings. As is well known, it was a Parisian court trial that inspired Wittgenstein to write his picture theory of language in the Tractatus logico-philosophicus – but less well known or at least far less reflected, are the courtroom scenarios he himself invented in his last writings, that is the writings dating from 1947 to 1951. There, Wittgenstein repeatedly sketches court proceedings by means of which he challenges the (...) validity of certain statements and modes of expression in the manner of a thought experiment, so it seems as if the courtroom serves to check and rebuke those misleading modes of expression that distort the ordinary use of language and to which we repeatedly let ourselves be tempted when philosophising. In the following, I will trace the role of these courtroom scenarios in Wittgenstein’s last writings and suggest that they primarily fulfil the methodological function of a touchstone for certain philosophical modes of expression and misleading images, and in this way help to survey the actual use of language. After a brief overview of the occurrences of courtroom scenarios in Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, I will take a closer look at some of these courtroom remarks in his later writings with regard to the modes of expression and misleading images problematised by Wittgenstein: these include the importance of inner processes, the ‘picture of the hidden inner’ as well as Moorean knowledge assertions and ‘unreasonable’ doubts. Based on this, I will finally elaborate on the methodological function of Wittgenstein’s courtroom scenarios. (shrink)

Deep Disagreements from the Logico-Pragmatical Point of View: An Analysis of Disagreements Based on Moyal-Sharrock’s Interpretation of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. Argumentation is central to philosophy. One of its primary functions is to resolve disagreement. Yet, there are cases of disagreement that undercut the conditions of possibility for argumentation themselves: deep disagreements. In his seminal paper, Fogelin conceived of deep disagreements in Wittgensteinian terms by highlighting their “grammatical” character. Other than normal disagreements, which are located in the space of giving and (...) receiving reasons, deep disagreements are concerned with what enables reasoning in the first place. Hence, they cannot be rationally resolved. Drawing on an interpretation of Moyal-Sharrock’s account of Wittgensteinian certainties, my logico-grammatical account proposes that deep disagreements pertain to certainties, viz. non-proposional ways of acting in the life-world that are epistemologically basic. Furthermore, the logico-grammatical analysis entails a gradual conception of the transition from normal to deep disagreements by differentiating different types and origins of certainties and specifying which forms of certainty can and cannot be dropped. Also, it allows to identify participating in the human form of life and discursive capabilities as conditions of possibility of disagreements. Consequently, it can specify the turning-point at which disagreement transforms into mere difference. It is at this point that the focus of a dispute switches from the rationality of the discourse to that of the agents of discourse. (shrink)