Discusssion of passages 243 et. seq. of Wittgenstein's Philosophical lnvestigations tends to concentrate on the argument supporting the thesis that a logically private language is impossible. When the discussion becomes broader, the presumption is generally that this thesis is one premifs of an argument against solipsism. I believe that the passages will support a valid argument that might, at first glance, give comfort to someone in the egocentric predicament, but that this comfort would quickly grow cold on closer examination. I (...) do not mean to suggest that Wittgenstein offers no escape from the predicament, only that the escape will not be a consequence of the pluralism necessary to the existence of language, but rather a byproduct of his discussion of the logic of mental discourse. In this paper, I state an alternative to the contra-solipsist reading of the passages, taking Wittgenstein there to be reflecting a three part dispute, the other participants of which are a skeptic and a philosopher I'll call ‘the Realist'. (shrink)

There are three remarks of Norman Malcolm’s with which I should like to begin. The first is his remark that.

La distinction de deux Wittgenstein est-elle mythique, ainsi que le voudrait R. J. Bernstein? Mythe créé involontairement par un penseur aussi peu mythomane que possible, B. Russell, quand, dans sa préface au Tractatus, il assigna à l'auteur l'intention d'établir les « conditions d'un langage logiquement parfait ». Prenant le contre-pied d'un Wittgenstein-I lancé à la poursuite d'un langage idéal, Wittgenstein-II aurait, dans Investigations philosophiques, opéré un retour au langage naturel et au sens commun.Il est sans doute possible d'exagérer la distance (...) qui sépare le Tractatus des Investigations philosophiques. Mais on ne saurait la nier. Quelques rétractations expresses enregistrées dans le second ouvrage nous en empêcheraient. Le problème est plutôt de déterminer l'ampleur et la nature de la transformation, de la mesurer. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's dictum in 580 of Philosophical Investigations, ‘An “inner process” stands in need of outward criteria’, is one of his most frequently mentioned remarks, and is largely treated as a particularly clear and unproblematic statement, at least as Wittgenstein's sayings go. When anyone finds it unproblematic, he naturally does not say what he takes it to mean; but if it is as mystifying as I will claim, and if its meaning is as well concealed as I will suggest, it is (...) almost certain that it has been widely and seriously misunderstood. (shrink)

In reading Wittgenstein one can, and for the most part perhaps should, treat the expression ‘language-game’ as a term of art, a more or less arbitrarily chosen item of terminology meaning something like ‘an actual or possible way of using words’. It would then be a fairly routine task to work out answers to such questions as what features of the ways a word is used are emphasized by this term of art, what philosophical purposes are served by the description (...) of primitive language-games or of variations on actual language-games, or in exactly what way those purposes are supposed to be served. (shrink)

Wittgenstein expounds his notion of a family resemblance in two important passages. The first is from The Blue Book:This craving for generality is the resultant of a number of tendencies connected with particular philosophical confusions. There is— The tendency to look for something common to entities which we commonly subsume under a general term. We are inclined to think that there must be something common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general (...) term “game” to the various games; whereas the games form a family the members of which have family likenesses …. There is a tendency rooted in our usual forms of expression, to think that a man who has learnt to understand a general term, say, the term “leaf,” has thereby come to possess a kind of general picture of a leaf, as opposed to pictures of particular leaves …. This again is connected with the idea that the meaning of a word is an image, or a thing correlated with the word. (shrink)

In "lectures and conversations" wittgenstein suggests that there is an "enormous gulf" between religious believers and non-believers, when the latter wish to dispute religious claims. d z phillips and others have interpreted his remarks as implying that non-believers cannot disagree with believers because different language-games are being played. i try to show that for wittgenstein the gulf exists for a different reason: non-believers take religious utterances as being truth claims, but they are not. they are really vehicles for conveying feelings (...) that cannot themselves be expressed. for him, the understanding of religious utterances is not, in principle, confined to believers. (shrink)

My purposes in this paper are to explain the constitutive-regulative distinction as set out by Kant in the Dialectic and Methodology, and to note its reappearance in contemporary philosophy.

Suppose that a jury in a murder trial brings in a verdict of guilty and one of the jurors still wonders whether the verdict is a good one, although he is not inclined to try to have it reversed. Is his attitude coherent?

What is the source of the hardness of the logical must? What does the necessity of mathematical and logical inference consist in? If I am plotting the curve y = x2 and assume that x = 2 I must conclude that y = 4; no other consequence can be drawn. What is the nature of this ‘must'?Understanding Wittgenstein's answer to this question is essential to understanding his later philosophy. The question of the nature of logical or mathematical necessity is as (...) fundamental for the Investigations as it obviously was for the Tractatus. Barry Stroud's article “Wittgenstein and Logical Necessity” certainly is still one of the most illuminating and important of the papers dealing with this question. (shrink)

Source: Masterss International, Volume: 40-07, page:. Thesis --University of Windsor, 1981.