Wittgenstein as a Common-Sense Realist

The later Wittgenstein is widely held to be a relativist, indeed a constructivist. By contrast, this paper argues that all appearances to the contrary Wittgenstein was a realist, and that this fact becomes almost conspicuous in his late-1940s manuscripts. His realism was a common-sense one, the only kind of realism worthy of the name. Wittgenstein’s common-sense realism has unique traits: first, an uncompromising stress on deviations from ordinary language as a source of (bad) philosophy. Secondly, his awareness of the significance of the pictorial & the motor. Thirdly, his emphasis on established use, that is, on traditions. In the later Wittgenstein, philosophical realism and social conservatism converge.

Interpretation und das Prinzip der Nachsicht

Davidson's principle of charity says that we should interpret someone's beliefs and utterances in such a way that these beliefs and utterances are, according to our own standards, mostly true. Davidson has advanced three major arguments for this principle. In the first part of this essay, I reconstruct these arguments and explain Davidson's project of a theory of interpretation as far as it is necessary for this reconstruction. In the second part of my article, it is shown that none of the three arguments for the principle of charity put forward by Davidson is convincing. I also examine the two most important arguments against Davidson's principle. It is demonstrated that these arguments are not compelling, too. The upshot of my discussion is that the debate between proponents and opponents of the principle of charity has reached stalemate.

Wittgenstein’s Thought-Experiments

Wittgenstein’sOne immediate result of comparing Wittgenstein’s thought-experiments with their counterparts in the analytic mainstream reveals an interesting trait: they are merely suggestive, in the sense that the theses they point to are rarely put forward explicitly, and even more rarely argued for in the manner that is nowadays fashionable in the mainstream. The paper briefly points to the difference by using the examples of Saul Kripke’s (1982) presentation of Rule-following and the unorthodox reading of the Builders by Charles Travis (1989), to illustrate the potential of the merely suggestive material for re-interpretation by a creative thinker.

‘Reddish Green’ – Wittgenstein on Concepts and the Limits of the Empirical

A “concept” in the sense favoured by Wittgenstein is a paradigm for a transition between parts of a notational system. A concept-determining sentence such as “There is no reddish green” registers the absence of such a transition. This suggests a plausible account of what is perceived in an experiment that was first designed by Crane and Piantanida, who claim to have induced perceptions of reddish green. I shall propose a redescription of the relevant phenomena, invoking only ordinary colour concepts. This redescription is not ruled out by anything the experimenters say. It accounts for certain peculiarities in both their descriptions and their subjects’, and suggests that instead of discovering forbidden colours the experimenters introduced a new use of “-ish”. Still, there is a point in speaking of “reddish green” in their context, which can be motivated by invoking what Wittgenstein calls a “physiognomy”.

Philosophy from an ‘Anthropological’ Point of View

In this paper I shall try to introduce a few aspects on the possible influence Piero Sraffa had on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Although we do not have many explicit sources, we find a few remarks in Wittgenstein’s manuscripts that contain Sraffa’s name in brackets. And interestingly enough they almost all deal with the fundamental relation between rules and empirical propositions. Wittgenstein raises questions such as: Do grammatical rules only say that words are actually used in a particular way? Do mathematical propositions describe how human beings usually calculate? Are the rules of chess descriptions of how the game has always been played? Wittgenstein’s discussions of these questions also had an impact on his philosophical turn towards an ‘anthropological’ point of view.

Objectivity and Idealism

This paper takes up a more so-called ‘austere’ argument for objectivity derived, for the most part, from P. F. Strawson’s

Stroud on Logical Necessity and General Facts of Nature

What makes the denial of a necessary truth impossible or unintelligible? Barry Stroud argues that there is an answer to this question which avoids Platonism, yet does not force us to adopt Conventionalism about logical necessity. In Part 1, I give a brief characterization of Platonism and Conventionalism and sketch some of the difficulties that arise when trying to explain logical necessity along either of those lines. In Part 2, I will summarize the main points of what Stroud has to say on the matter and raise what I believe to be serious difficulties for his account.

Wittgenstein, Wissen und die Gnade der Natur

This paper is an attempt to explain Wittgenstein’s remark that „It is always by favor of Nature that one knows something.“ In this regard, two positions are distinguished. The first one is the standard interpretation within analytic epistemology. Alternatively, I will suggest another possibility to interpret Wittgenstein’s remark, which is inspired by John McDowell’s epistemological disjunctivism. As I am going to show, the alternative is the better choice.

What is interpretation? A dilemma for Davidson

The core idea of Davidson’s philosophy of language is that a theory of truth constructed as an empirical theory by a radical interpreter is a theory of meaning. I discuss an ambiguity that arises from Davidson's notion of interpretation: it can either be understood as the hypothetical process of constructing a theory of truth for a language or as a process that actually happens when speakers communicate. I argue that each disambiguation is problematic and does not result in a theory of meaning.