This work, written from a neo-Pyrrhonian perspective, is an examination of contemporary theories of knowledge and justification. It takes ideas primarily found in Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism, restates them in a modern idiom, and then asks whether any contemporary theory of knowledge meets the challenges they raise. The first part, entitled "Gettier and the Problem of Knowledge," attempts to rescue our ordinary concept of knowledge from those philosophers who have assigned burdens to it that it cannot bear. Properly understood, (...) Fogelin shows that the concept of knowledge is unproblematic. The second part of this study, called "Agrippa and the Problem of Justification," examines Agrippa's contribution to Pyrrhonism, a systematic reduction of its procedures which came to be known as the "Five Modes Leading to the Suspension of Belief." These modes present a completely general procedure for refuting any claim a dogmatist might make. Though largely unnoticed, there is, according to Fogelin, an uncanny resemblance between problems posed by Agrippa's "Five Modes" and those that contemporary epistemologists address under the heading of a theory of justification. Fogelin examines the strongest contemporary theories of justification--in both foundationalist and anti-foundationalist forms. The conclusion is that recent philosophical writings on justification have made no significant progress in responding to the Pyrrhonian problems these writings have addressed. (shrink)

In this volume, Pears examines the internal organization of Wittgenstein's thought and the origins of his philosophy to provide unusually clear insight into the philosopher's ideas. Part I surveys the whole of Wittgenstein's work, while Part II details the central concepts of his early system; both reveal how the details of Wittgenstein's work fit into its general pattern.

An attempt is made to answer the question why wittgenstein might have found the analogy between speaking and playing games philosophically exciting. It is argued that on the face of it the two are strikingly disanalogous, But that on reflecting further one can find various features of games (9 are distinguished in all) which are also features of some speech episodes, And the awareness of which could be philosophically significant.

In ‘Wittgenstein on Language and Rules’, Professor N. Malcolm took us to task for misinterpreting Wittgenstein's arguments on the relationship between the concept of following a rule and the concept of community agreement on what counts as following a given rule. Not that we denied that there are any grammatical connections between these concepts. On the contrary, we emphasized that a rule and an act in accord with it make contact in language. Moreover we argued that agreement in judgments and (...) in definitions is indeed necessary for a shared language. But we denied that the concept of a language is so tightly interwoven with the concept of a community of speakers as to preclude its applicabilty to someone whose use of signs is not shared by others. Malcolm holds that ‘This is an unwitting reduction of Wittgenstein's originality. That human agreement is necessary for “shared” language is not so striking a thought as that it is essential for language simpliciter .’ Though less striking, we believe that it has the merit of being a true thought. We shall once more try to show both that it is correct, and that it is a correct account of Wittgenstein's arguments. (shrink)

I. Recent years have witnessed a great resurgence of interest in the writings of the later Wittgenstein, especially with those passages roughly, Philosophical Investigations p)I 38 — 242 and Remarks on the Foundations of mathematics, section VI that are concerned with the topic of rules. Much of the credit for all this excitement, unparalleled since the heyday of Wittgenstein scholarship in the early IIJ6os, must go to Saul Kripke's I4rittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. It is easy to explain why. (...) To begin with, the dialectic Kripke uncovered from Wittgenstein's.. (shrink)

Saul Kripke, among others, reads Wittgenstein’s private-language argument as an inference from the idea of rule following: The concept of a private language is inconsistent, because using language entails following rules, and following rules entails being a member of a community. Kripke expresses the key exegetical claim underlying that reading as follows.

This text offers major re-evaluation of Wittgenstein's thinking. It is a collection of essays that presents a significantly different portrait of Wittgenstein. The essays clarify Wittgenstein's modes of philosophical criticism and shed light on the relation between his thought and different philosophical traditions and areas of human concern. With essays by Stanley Cavell, James Conant, Cora Diamond, Peter Winch and Hilary Putnam, we see the emergence of a new way of understanding Wittgenstein's thought. This is a controversial collection, with essays (...) by highly regarded Wittgenstein scholars that may change the way we look at Wittgenstein's body of work. (shrink)

1. The early philosophy--language as picture -- 2. Logic and ontology -- 3. "My world and its value" -- 4. The later philosophy--views and reviews -- 5. Method and essense -- 6. Meaning -- 7. Criteria -- 8. Knowing, naming, certainty, and idealism -- 9. The private language argument -- 10. Logical necessity and rules -- 11. Philosophy of mathematics -- 12. Persons -- 13. Psychology and conceptual relativity -- 14. Aesthetics, ethics, and religion -- 15. Elective affinities.

Essays offer a glimpse of the Vienna-born philosopher's personality, character, and life's work.

This third volume of the monumental commentary on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations covers sections 243-427, which constitute the heart of the book. Like the previous volumes, it consists of philosophical essays and exegesis. The thirteen essays cover all the major themes of this part of Wittgenstein's masterpiece: the private language arguments, privacy, avowals and descriptions, private ostensive definition, criteria, minds and machines, behavior and behaviorism, the self, the inner and the outer, thinking, consciounesss, and the imagination. The exegesis clarifies and evaluates (...) Wittgenstein's arguments, drawing extensively on all the unpublished papers, examining the evolution of his ideas in manuscript sources and definitively settling many controversies about the interpretation of the published text. This commentary, like its predecessors, is indispensable for the study of Wittgenstein and is essential reading for students of the philosophy of mind. A fourth and final volume, entitled Wittgenstein: Mind and Will will complete the commentary. (shrink)

The main interpretive claim of this book is that both Wittgenstein’s mature philosophical method and his much misunderstood critique of private language have their roots in his critique of the misleading metaphor of phenomenal space–that is, the misleading, figurative analogy between physical space, or space simpliciter, and phenomenal space, or the “space” of appearances. His critique of this metaphor extends from his rejection of sense-data (Chapters 2 and 3), to his investigation of the asymmetry between first- and other-person pronouns in (...) conjunction with psychological vocabulary (Chapter 4), to his discussion of noticing aspects (Chapter 3), and, of course, to his revolutionary critique of the privacy of the mental (Chapter 3) and of the related, but more general, misleading metaphor of the inner and the outer. Wittgenstein’s critique of the idea of phenomenal space is, at the same time, the prototype for his new philosophical method–the method of grammatical investigation, which holds that many of the persistent problems of philosophy arise from failing to command a clear view of the grammar of various regions of our language and finding ourselves, as a result, vulnerable to misleading pictures of our mental lives, of our linguistic practices, of mathematics, and of countless fundamental elements of our world view(s), whose misunderstanding is the locus of the traditional problems of metaphysics (Chapter 3). Chapters 5, 6 and 7 argue for the continued relevance of Wittgenstein's critique of the misleading metaphor of phenomenal space by showing how it applies to contemporary discussions of first-person authority, recent attempts to revive sense-datum theories, and the ongoing debate about sensory qualia. (shrink)

This essay traces the roots of Wittgenstein’s Pyrrhonism to Mauthner, and argues that Wittgenstein’s later views moved even closer to those of Mauthner, although Wittgenstein never became as thoroughgoing a Pyrrhonian as Mauthner had been. It is argued that Mauthner’s neo-Pyrrhonian view of language was “responsible for the linguistic turn in Wittgenstein’s thinking and thereby indirectly also for the whole linguistic turn in 20th-century analytic philosophy”.

The title of this chapter is borrowed from John McDowell's ‘One strand in the private language argument’ (1998b). In that paper, he argues that much of what is best in Wittgenstein's discussion of private language can be seen as a development of the Kantian insight that there is no such thing as an unconceptualized experience - that even the most elementary sensation must have a conceptual aspect. On McDowell's view, a sensation is a ‘perfectly good something - an object, if (...) you like, of concept involving awareness. What is a nothing … is the supposed pre-conceptual this that is supposed to ground our conceptualizations’ (1998b: 283). McDowell's Sellarsian objections to the notion of the Given in that paper are an insightful and illuminating development of Wittgenstein's discussion of the topic. However, McDowell's recoil from the notion of an unconceptualized experience, a conception of sensation on which it turns out to be ‘simply a nothing’ (ibid.), leads him to reject Wittgenstein's cryptic proposal that a sensation is ‘not a something, but not a nothing either’ (PI 304). Instead, McDowell embraces the opposed view on which every experience is a ‘perfectly good something’ (1998b: 283), something of one kind or another, for it must be possible to bring it under the appropriate concepts. What McDowell misses here, I believe, is that a central aim of Wittgenstein's discussion of our supposed ability to refer to inner objects is to attack the very idea of ‘pre-linguistic awareness … as a substratum on which the capacity for concept-carried awareness is constructed’ (ibid.). (shrink)

Meaning, Understanding, and Practice is a selection of the most notable essays of leading contemporary philosopher Barry Stroud on a set of topics central to analytic philosophy. In this collection, Stroud offers penetrating studies of meaning, understanding, necessity, and the intentionality of thought. Throughout he asks how much can be expected from a philosophical account of one's understanding of the meaning of something, and questions whether such an account can succeed without implying that the person understands many other things as (...) well. Most of the essays work with ideas derived from Wittgenstein, and five of the essays focus specifically on Wittgenstein's philosophy. Stroud's helpful introduction draws out the recurring themes he pursues and explains how his ideas and aims have developed over the years. (shrink)

In reflecting about experience, philosophers are prone to fall into a dualism of conceptual scheme and pre-conceptual given, according to which the most basic judgments of experience are grounded in non-conceptual impingements on subjects of experience. This idea is dubiously coherent: relations of grounding or justification should hold between conceptually structured items. This thought has been widely applied to 'outer' experience; at least some of the Private Language Argument can be read as applying it to 'inner' experience. In this light, (...) Wittgenstein's suggestion that a sensation is 'not a something' seems infelicitous. The main point of this reading of Wittgenstein is in Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature', but Rorty locates the point in the context of a subtle materialism, and a 'communitarian' substitute for first-person authority, which seem non-Wittgensteinian. (shrink)

Joining a vast Wittgensteinian anti-theoretical movement, John Canfield has argued that it is possible to read the claims that (1) “language is essentially communal” and (2) “it is conceptually possible that a Crusoe isolated from birth should speak or follow rules” in such a way that they are perfectly compatible, and, indeed, that Wittgenstein held them both at once. The key to doing this is to drain them of any theoretical content or implications that would put each claim at odds (...) with the other. I argue here, first of all, that it is not possible to detheorize both (1) and (2) and still hope to say anything illuminating about the nature of language. In fact, Canfield himself does not succeed in detheorizing both (1) and (2) but ends up trivializing (1) and leaving (2) with quite a bit of theoretical content. I further argue, however, that this is getting the matter the wrong way around. Contra Canfield et al., it is only when we recognize this that we can appreciate how radical and innovative Wittgenstein's claims about language really are. (shrink)

?258 of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is often seen as the core of his private language argument. While its role is certainly overinflated and it is a mistake to think that there is anything that could be called the private language argument, ?258 is an important part of the private language sections of the Philosophical Investigations. As with so much of Wittgenstein's work, there are widely diverse interpretations of why exactly the private diarist's attempted ostensive definition fails. I argue for a (...) version of the no-stage-setting interpretation of the failure of private ostension. On this interpretation, the reason why the diarist cannot establish a meaning for ?S? is that she lacks the conceptual-linguistic stage-setting needed to disambiguate the concentration of her attention (the private analogue of an ostensive definition). Thus, the problem with any subsequent use of ?S? is not that there is no criterion of correctness for remembering the meaning of ?S? correctly, or for re-identifying S correctly in the future. Rather, it is because of the initial failure to define ?S? that there is nothing that could count as a criterion of correctness for the future use of ?S?; there is nothing to remember or re-identify. My argument for the no-stage-setting interpretation consists in showing how well it fits into the rest of the Philosophical Investigations and in defending it against objections from Robert J. Fogelin, Anthony Kenny, and most recently John V. Canfield. Kenny's and Canfield's objections are found to suffer from problems regarding memory scepticism. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein's treatment of private language has received more attention than any other aspect of his philosophy. Yet, for more than fifty years, a remarkably self-contained exegetical tradition has defined the terms of debate and the principal positions that are discussed. Orthodox interpreters hold that the proof that a private language is impossible turns on showing it is ruled out by some set of systematic philosophical commitments about logic, meaning, and knowledge. Leading candidates for this ground on which the argument (...) depends have included the analysis of concepts, the grammar of our everyday language, the logic of criteria, or the nature of our rule-following, practical activity, or form of life. This article introduces an alternative interpretive tradition, which not only rejects the orthodox methodology, but also rejects the presupposition that Wittgenstein's principal aim is to provide a deductive proof that the idea of a private language leads to contradiction. Finally, it examines some of the leading readings of Philosophical Investigations §258, the passage most frequently discussed by orthodox interpreters. -/- . (shrink)

Why worry about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus? Did not Wittgenstein himself come to think it was largely a mistaken work? Is not Wittgenstein’s important work his later work? And does not his later work consist in a rejection of his earlier views? So does not the interest of the Tractatus mostly lie in its capacity to furnish a particularly vivid exemplar of the sort of philosophy that the mature Wittgenstein was most concerned to reject? So is it not true that the only (...) real reason to worry about the Tractatus is to become clear about what sort of thing it was that the later Wittgenstein was most against in philosophy? Is the interest of the book therefore not largely exhausted by its capacity to show us what the later Wittgenstein did not think? Much of the secondary literature on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, either implicitly or explicitly, answers these questions largely in the affirmative. The aim of this paper is to suggest that the manner in which it has done so has done much to obstruct the possibility of an understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy – both early and late. The aim is not to suggest that these questions should be answered instead in the negative, but rather to furnish a prolegomenon to the possibility of a proper understanding of what – and how much – ought to be affirmed in answering them in the affirmative. As the present volume makes evident, there is currently a debate underway about how to read (and how not to read) Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. This paper will not attempt a direct contribution to that debate,2 it will attempt instead to bring out some of what might be at stake in that debate. It is natural to think that all that ought to be at stake is a fairly parochial question concerning the proper interpretation of Wittgenstein’s work during a single, relatively early phase of his philosophical development. Thus it is natural to conclude that, whatever differences may divide the parties to this debate concerning how to read the Tractatus, nonetheless, au fond these interpreters of Wittgenstein may be in broad agreement about how to read most of the rest of Wittgenstein’s work – or, at least, whatever their disagreements may be about the early work, they are ones that can be independently adjudicated, without substantial cost to anyone’s prior.... (shrink)

Takes a look at early discussions of the private language argument in the Vienna Circle and the influence of Wittgenstein's ideas. This book examines the relation between the early and later Wittgenstein on this subject.