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 article considers the problem of how to elucidate the concept of nonsense. Viewed from a general philosophical standpoint this matters because the concept is used by certain philosophers in their criticism of philosophical questions and theses. I start with a presentation of examples of utterances considered nonsense, along with Baier's classification of kinds of nonsense. I then present various approaches, pointing out that none of them are completely satisfactory. I subsequently propose an approach that is a modification of the (...) austere conception: while consistent with the latter in that it treats nonsense as a lack of something, it differs by holding that a determination of the nature of various instances of nonsense can only be accomplished by examining how we show that some given utterance is nonsense. This approach places the emphasis on distinguishing the question of the meaninglessness of an utterance from the question of the incorrectness of linguistic expressions. The advantage of my conception is that on the one hand, it does not deny that there is an important non-psychological difference between philosophical nonsense and gibberish, while on the other it avoids the absurdity that philosophical utterances are nonsense because what they say is nonsensical. (shrink)