Abstract

Are philosophers regularly led into error by misleading pictures, grammatical appearances, illusions and fictions? An affirmative answer to this question lies at the heart of the writings of the later Wittgenstein on mind and language. Another affirmative answer was given much earlier by Anton Marty. The two Austrian philosophers think that philosophers regularly succumb to certain temptations which lie in natural language. Many of the examples given by the two philosophers are indeed the same. I set out the similarities between the two accounts of misleading pictures and argue that many aspects of the two accounts can be defended independently of the very different conceptions of the philosophy of Marty and Wittgenstein. The paper shows how important it is to consider Wittgenstein’s Austrian predecessors if he is to be understood.