La tesis de la privacidad linguitica nace con el gesto fundador de la filosofía moderna que apoya toda legitimidad en la subjetividad y la conciencia. Ello da origen a dos problemas filos�ficos fundamentales, concernientes al mundo y al solipsismo. El siglo XX creyó encontrar en el lenguaje una salida a estos problemas. Wittgenstein es allí una pieza clave. Sin embargo las interpretaciones más influyentes de Wittgenstein enfocaron la crítica del lenguaje privado de tal modo que la salida debía permanecer en (...) el terreno epistemológico de las garantías o criterio de corrección (Malcolm, Fogelin, Kenny, Canfield, Tugendhat). Sostenemos que la interpretación propuesta por Kripke se apoya un un agudo diagnóstico de la fuente de estas dificultades, dándose cuenta que la refutación del lenguaje privado requería abandonar toda una concepción, la del realismo, que afectaban por igual al lenguaje privado y al público. Su argumentación, centrada en la semántica, irradia consecuencias más allá de la misma. Su "solución escéptica" al establecer que los juicios de corrección, entendidos como básicos y primitivos, sólo poseen sentido en el marco de una comunidad uniforme en sus juicios, coloca al discurso filosófico en un nuevo terreno. (shrink)

What do we learn about language from reading Wittgenstein'sPhilosophical Investigations? This question gains urgency from Wittgenstein's alleged animus against philosophical theorizing and his indirectness. Section 1 argues that Wittgenstein's goal is to prevent philosophical questioning about the foundations of language from the beginning. This conception of his aim is not in tension with Wittgenstein's use of the notion of community; community interpretations of his views betray a misguided commitment to the coherence of the idea that language might need grounding. Wittgenstein's (...) goal is not to enjoin us not to step outside of language-games, but to show that we have insufficiently clear grasp of the terms we try to use to express the limits of intelligibility. Section 2 suggests that appreciating Wittgenstein's moral concerning the relation between language and philosophizing about it involves allowing him to teach us how to read his book. What makes readingPhilosophical Investigations possible is openness to learning how not to forget our lives in language. (shrink)

This paper is a critical examination of Wittgenstein's view of the limits of intelligibility. In it I criticize standard analytic readings of Wittgenstein as an advocate of transcendental or behaviourist theses in epistemology; and I propose an alternative interpretation of Wittgenstein's view as a social contextualism that transcends the false dichotomy between Kantianism and psychologism. I argue that this social contextualism is strikingly similar to the social account of epistemic practices developed by Pierre Bourdieu. Through a comparison between Wittgenstein's and (...) Bourdieu's view and an analysis of the notion of habitus , I try to show how social contextualism can account for the distinction between sense and nonsense without falling into transcendental constructivism or social behaviourism. (shrink)

Phenomena such as our “understanding in a flash” and our immediate knowledge of the meaning of our own utterances seem to point to problems that call for philosophical explanation. Even though the meaning of an utterance appears to depend on where and when we use it, on what we use it for and on what we expect in response, we do not examine such circumstances when asked what we mean. Instead we simply say what we mean. Similarly, our having grasped (...) a rule is something shown by how we perform certain tasks and respond to certain requests. But we frequently declare that we have indeed grasped a rule without paying any attention to those overt performances and, despite this, we are normally correct. These facts seem puzzling and impel us towards a certain philosophical picture of meaning and understanding. This picture identifies the meaning of a subject’s utterances, and his understanding of the rules that he follows, with some kind of structure of which he has immediate knowledge. By virtue of their connection with these private, meaning-constituting phenomena, the public manifestations of meaning and understanding are invaluable as clues to the meaning of an utterance or a subject’s understanding of a rule. But the latter are, nevertheless, ultimately fixed by the inner structures to which only the subject in question has immediate access and upon which he or she therefore has authority. This picture prompts a host of perplexing questions. “What are these immediately-knowable structures?” “What does it mean to say that we have immediate acquaintance with them?” “How are these private structures connected with those public performances?” These questions are notoriously difficult to answer. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to discover whether or not a solitary individual, a human being isolated from birth, could become a rule-follower. The argumentation against this possibility rests on the claim that such an isolate could not become aware of a normative standard, with which her actions could agree or disagree. As a consequence, theorists impressed by this argumentation adopt a view on which the normativity of rules arises from corrective practices in which agents engage in a community. (...) However, it has been suggested that an isolated individual could engage in such a practice by herself. Three prospective examples of such cases are considered, and the possibility of solitary rule-following is vindicated. Furthermore, the nature of the goals at which rule-following practices generally aim is clarified. (shrink)

El artículo analiza hasta que punto puede equipararse la labor del traductor con la de realizar una interpretación de los textos sobre los que trabaja. Utilizaremos para ello instrumental tanto de la tradición de la filosofía hermenéutica (especialmente Hans-Georg Gadamer) como de la inspirada en la obra de Ludwig Wittgenstein. La conclusión intenta mostrar las fuertes diferencias que existen entre traducir e interpretar, y con ello entender mejor qué quiere decir realmente la idea de "universalidad hermenéutica" que funda la citada (...) tradición de filosofía ídem. (shrink)

In his Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language , Saul Kripke presents his influential reading of Wittgenstein’s later writings on language. One of the largely unexplored features of that reading is that Kripke makes a small number of suggestive remarks concerning the possible threat that Wittgenstein’s arguments pose for Chomsky’s linguistic project. In this paper, we attempt to characterise the relevance of Wittgenstein’s later work on meaning and rule-following for transformational linguistics, and in particular to identify the potentially negative impact (...) it has on that project. Although we use Kripke’s remarks to articulate some of the pertinent issues, we return to Wittgenstein’s later writings to address them. We argue that Wittgenstein’s main target in the relevant sections of the Philosophical Investigations is the notion of ‘logical compulsion’, which involves assuming that there is more to applying a word or rule than how we are naturally or “psychologically” compelled to apply. We characterise two of the main lines of argument in the Investigations in terms of the rejection of logical compulsion. We thus propose to address the relevance of Wittgenstein’s writings for Chomsky by considering whether Chomsky’s linguistics presupposes the targeted notion of logical compulsion. We argue that Chomsky’s conception of linguistic competence in terms of successive states of the “language faculty” (containing the principles of universal grammar) does presuppose this problematic notion. Chomsky responded to Kripke by devoting a chapter of his Knowledge of Language to defending this conception of linguistic competence against the Wittgensteinian arguments. We evaluate his response and argue that he has misidentified the threat to his linguistic project as consisting in the attack on its ‘individual psychology’ standpoint, rather than its commitment to logical compulsion. We conclude by arguing that Chomsky’s attempts at defending his individualist or non-communitarian standpoint are undermined by his inability to give a decisive response to Wittgenstein’s attack on logical compulsion. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore two objections raised against Bulygin’s second approach to the definition of the nature of legal power-conferring rules. According to the first objection, such an account is vague about what is defined by legal power-conferring rules qua constitutive rules. I maintain that this vagueness is rooted in the lack of a suitable definition of legal power. I shall be arguing for the reduction of the complexity of the definientia by defining legal power as a species of (...) competence. According to the second objection, this non-reductive approach cannot explain the normativity of this kind of rules. Against this approach, it argues that legal powerconferring rules perform a deontic and a definitional function as constitutive rules of legal practice. (shrink)