Abstract
In the collection Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (I, §149) Wittgenstein encourages us to imagine a group of people selling wood at a price relative to the area covered by the pile of wood irrespective of the height of the pile. In “Wittgenstein and Logical Necessity” Barry Stroud argues that Wittgenstein uses this scenario to steer between two untenable positions: (i) Frege’s Platonism, according to which the wood sellers must be considered to be insane, and (ii) a version of conventionalism which leaves open the possibility of ways of inferring, counting, and calculating different to ours. At first sight, the behaviour of the wood sellers seems to be comprehensible. But, as Stroud argues, the more we project our grammatical structures and categories into their verbal and non-verbal behaviour, the less intelligible the wood sellers become. In what follows, I discuss Stroud’s account of the unintelligibility of the wood sellers and I contrast it with Johan Canfield’s critical reading of this verdict.
