Wittgenstein characterises ‘necessary truths’ as rules of representation that do not answer to reality. The invocation of rules of representation has led many to compare his work with Kant's. This comparison is illuminating, but it can also be misleading. Some go as far as casting Wittgenstein's later philosophy as a specie of transcendental idealism, an interpretation that continues to gather support despite scholars pointing to its limitations. To understand the temptation of this interpretation, attention must be paid to a distinction (...) Bernard Williams (1981) makes, echoing Kant, between empirical and transcendental idealism. Williams claims that the move to transcendental idealism is an effort to block empirical idealism. The latter, in this context, amounts to a scepticism regarding necessity and a denial of its objectivity. To show what is wrong with the transcendental interpretation, it is important to challenge the mistaken presumption that Wittgenstein's philosophy would otherwise lead to empirical idealism. The fundamental mistake common to both attributions is that they misunderstand the relation that obtains between our rules of representation and the contingent facts that condition those rules of representation. Once this relation has been clarified, Wittgenstein's philosophy can be understood as providing a genuine alternative to realism and idealism. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's conception of logical and conceptual truth is often thought to rival that of the logical positivists. This paper argues that there are important respects in which these conceptions complement each other. Analyticity, in the positivists' sense, coincides, not with Wittgenstein's notion of a grammatical proposition, but rather with his notion of a tautology. Grammatical propositions can usually be construed as analyticity postulates in Carnap's sense of the term. This account of grammatical and analytic propositions will be illustrated by appeal (...) to logical, conceptual and arithmetic truths. Its consequences for an analysis of corresponding modal notions will be indicated. (shrink)

In my previous paper "Has the later Wittgenstein accounted for necessity?" I argued against the conventionalist account of necessity proposed by Wittgenstein and his followers. Glock has addressed some of my objections in his paper "Necessity and Language: In Defence of Conventionalism". This brief rejoinder considers Glock's replies to three of those objections. In the course of doing so, I revisit Wittgenstein's explanation of the special status of necessary propositions, the supposedly arbitrary nature of colour-grammatical propositions, and the relation between (...) rules and modality. (shrink)

Kalhat has forcefully criticised Wittgenstein's linguistic or conventionalist account of logical necessity, drawing partly on Waismann and Quine. I defend conventionalism against the charge that it cannot do justice to the truth of necessary propositions, renders them unacceptably arbitrary or reduces them to metalingustic statements. At the same time, I try to reconcile Wittgenstein's claim that necessary propositions are constitutive of meaning with the logical positivists’ claim that they are true by virtue of meaning. Explaining necessary propositions by reference to (...) linguistic conventions does not reduce modal to non‐modal notions, but it avoids metaphysical accounts, which are incapable of explaining how we can have a priori knowledge of necessity. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's 'plan for the treatment of psychological concepts' in the second volume of his Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (§§63, 148) is often understood as motivated by purely classificatory concerns that have little philosophical significance. I argue that this is a misinterpretation of Wittgenstein and that his planned and partly realized 'treatment of psychological concepts' deserves a better fate. In the first part of the paper I attempt to show that Wittgenstein's interest in psychological concepts in RPPII, far from (...) being merely an interest in their classification, is in fact closely connected to one important element of his conception of philosophy in the Philosophical Investigations, the requirement that 'all explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place' (PI §109). In the second part of the paper I present the broad outlines of Wittgenstein's new, post-Investigations treatment of psychological concepts, as they are seen both in the account of the concepts directly addressed in RPPII §§63, 148 (those of seeing and other sense-impressions, of sensations, mental images and emotions), and also elsewhere in that volume where other important psychological concepts are discussed, e.g., those of thinking, intention and states of mind (Seelenzustande). Although it represents work in progress that was never brought to completion, I suggest that the account of psychological concepts in RPPII is an original, insufficiently appreciated strand of thought within Wittgenstein's oeuvre, and also that it is an account worth exploring for anyone not convinced by the scientism accepted by so much of the recent philosophy of mind. (shrink)