However, the editors of this collection had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing von Wright in Helsinki in February , when he was pre- sented an honorary doctorate from the University of Bergen. During our discussion von Wright told us that he had recently been preoccupied with the question how to read the Tractatus. He was especially concerned with the notion of truth and its relation to the distinction between the senseless and the nonsensical.
Given these distinctions, how are we to understand the sentences of the Tractatus itself? However, it is essential that sentences be meaningful in virtue of being contingently true or false. The sentences of the Tractatus, on the other hand, are neither contingent sentences nor logical sentences.
Von Wright suggests that Tractarian sentences, since they do not describe states of affairs, should be treated on a par with other sentences that display a zeropolar truth-relation, e.
This is because they attempt to say something that cannot within the limits of the picture theory be said. What, then, is the function of the Tractarian sentences? Von Wright says that, although they do not say anything, they may show something of value to the philosopher. But what precisely do the sentences of the Tractatus attempt to show? This, he concludes, is the moral sense of the Tractatus. But what criterion can we use to distinguish these two types of nonsense?
Thus von Wright accepts, at least implicitly, that the Tractatus attempts to present a theory of language and meaning, and that Wittgenstein is guilty of inconsis- tency and irresolution in not adhering to his own theory in the preface. For an introduction to the issues in this debate, see A. Crary and R. Read eds. Von Wright leaves open the ques- tion as to why Wittgenstein fell into such an inconsistency or muddle.
As we will see, Cora Diamond and James Conant address some of these issues in their papers. But this difference, he argues, is hardly fundamental. However, we can ask ourselves what the purpose of such description is, and how such a task should be approached. Thus the early Wittgenstein seems to think that, once the nature of the proposition has been clarified in its entirety, all the other problems that pre- occupy him will also become clear: the nature and status of the propositions of logic, the nature of negation, of inference, and so on.
According to McGinn, Wittgenstein shares both the problems that pre- occupy him in his early work, and at least to some extent the preconcep- tions or commitments that frame that early philosophy, with Frege and Russell. Logic is thus concerned with universal principles of reasoning, i. Wittgenstein shares with Frege and Russell a general commitment to this framework. Something that depends for its truth solely on its own logical properties cannot properly speaking be called a proposition, since it cannot represent how things are in the world compare this to what von Wright says about the problems of talking about sentences that have a unipolar relation to truth.
It is this logical form of possible states of affairs that language itself manifests that must be made perspicuous, and this is something Frege and Russell failed to realize.
Logic, on the other hand, is not concerned with what is true, but with what is essential before any pro- position can be compared with reality for truth or falsity. Frege and Russell see inference as justified by the laws of logic which are seen on a par with the laws of physics. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, thinks that once the rela- tion between propositions is made perspicuous, inference, too, will be grounded in the propositions themselves, not in any general laws of logic. A proposition expresses its sense, and the relations between propositions with sense justify our inference from one proposition to another.
This fails to make clear how a proposition expresses its sense, which, according to Witt- genstein, is something it achieves in virtue of its essential bipolarity a point that von Wright also stresses in his paper.
But in his early work this clarificatory task is hampered by his preconceptions about language and logic. Generally speaking, this view has been the object of much criticism. Moyal-Sharrock ed. See N. However, both Diamond and Winch think we should not let this shift obscure the essential unity of his philosophy. Winch locates what is central to the post-Tractatus thought in the totally new significance of partic- ular cases in philosophy, which involves a new understanding of generality.
A somewhat differ- ent kind of mentalistic reading has been put forward more recently by Peter Hacker in his criticism of Winch. Die Projektionsmethode is das Denken des Satz-Sinnes. We use the perceptible sign of a proposition … as a projection of a possible situation. The projection method is the thinking of the propositional sense.
As Diamond notes, the various mentalistic readings of the Tractatus are committed to a link between the logic of language and a structure of possibilities external to it i. This kind of interpretation of 3. However, Diamond thinks that both Rhees and Winch get into difficul- ties when they try to link two issues in their reading of 3. Diamond herself wants to give what she thinks is a more natural reading of the passage reflected in her suggestion for a better transla- tion, see above.
Winch ascribed a use account of names to Wittgenstein; simple names in the Tractatus do genu- inely refer, but this is dependent only on their functioning in a certain way within a symbolism, i. The same thing, Winch claimed, applies to ordinary names; reference is given entirely in terms of how the sign in question is used i. However, as Hacker has pointed out in his criticism of Winch, this is certainly wrong when it comes to ordinary names; their reference cannot be determined by their use alone.
TLP 2. Instead Diamond says we should realize that making sense of the possibility of different objects of the same logical form can only be achieved internally, through language — the philosophical picture of the possible ambiguity in our names is confused and builds upon a kind of external per- spective here Diamond endorses a reading by Warren Goldfarb.
This formalism, she claims, is clearly visible in the way Winch under- stands the distinction between sense and nonsense in the Tractatus. Diamond, of course, disagrees with this view, which she claims is at the heart of the formalist reading. Diamond thinks that such a for- malist reading is completely inconsistent with the text itself, and in fact even more misleading than the mentalistic reading.
A crucial element in the formalist reading that Diamond picks out is the mis understanding of the nature of the distinction between sense and non- sense.
Both Rhees and Winch claim that the Tractatus aims to provide a gen- eral rule or principle for making that distinction. Another problem that follows from the Rhees-Winch reading is reflected in their view that the aim of the Tractatus is a kind of grammatical clarifica- tion. This, she thinks, cannot be right. Again, the formalist reading says that the combination of signs itself determines whether it is nonsense, and this Diamond thinks is clearly in conflict with what Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus.
The easiest way to define a standard reading would be to say that in the Tractatus the standard reader finds a number of substantive philosophical theses formulated and defended which we must understand together in order to understand the work as a whole. The reso- lute reading, alternatively, says that in order to understand the author of the Tractatus we must take him at his word: we should not willy-nilly ascribe theses and doctrines to him, but rather recognize them as nonsense through and through in order to be able to complete the task the author has set us.
In this famous passage Wittgenstein writes that his sentences serve as elucidations, and that anyone who understands him will eventually recog- nize them as nonsensical, to be used as rungs or steps on the ladder that is eventually to be thrown away. This would enable the reader to recognize the elucidatory sentences as non- sensical. Instead, says Conant, the resolute reading does not take the presence of this paradox in the text to be a symptom of a kind of wavering or irreso- lution on part of the author like von Wright implies in his paper , but rather as a part of the ladder that we the readers have to throw away.
What the reader has to achieve, then, is clarity — he has to be able to see trough the illusion. We must remember that Wittgenstein never says that all sentences in the Tractatus are to be recog- nized as nonsensical.
Conant proposes that we can arrive at a tentative preliminary list of can- didate sentences through the following procedure: 1. A given standard reader compiles a list of sentences that can be associated with alleged philosophical theses he would ascribe to the work.
A given resolute reader compiles a set of sentences taken to be examples of Tractarian elucidatory nonsense. Instead, they are to be unmasked as philosophical temptations that the author intends the reader to overcome. Conant admits that the question is very delicate and that the line cannot be drawn once and for all. This allows us to see both the continuity and the discontinuity in his thought, concludes Conant.
This also means that the candidate items are sentences that correspond closely to for- mulations both in the Tractatus and the Investigations. The sentences on this list can either be understood as showing a particular unwitting preconcep- tion about how things must be and thus also belonging on list two, repre- senting a moment of discontinuity , or as something that may be ascribed both to the author of the Tractatus and the author of the Investigations thus representing a moment of continuity.
Stern, too, thinks that the answer to this question is far from clear. A disagreement between those who hold that Wittgenstein ends tradi- tional philosophy in order to do philosophy better, and those who claim he wanted to end philosophy and teach us to get by without a replace- ment.
Stern thinks it odd that the debate is carried on in such a polarized way. But as soon as one looks at the particular cases, any neat distinctions crumble. Each view can, of course, be supported by different kinds of evidence.
It is clear that in some sense it is a criticism of philosophical errors or mistakes. But where does or should this criticism lead us?
Pyrrhonian scepti- cism is at least in the form attributable to Sextus Empiricus sceptical of any and all philosophical doctrines and theories including itself. According to the Pyrrhonian reading, then, Wittgenstein aims at a therapeutic critique of all philosophy, including his own, and this should allow us to stop doing philosophy altogether.
According to non-Pyrrhonians, on the other hand, he wanted to end traditional philosophy so as to be able to do philosophy bet- ter. Stern notes that in practice, most Wittgenstein scholars oscillate between these different views even when ostensibly subscribing to one of them. However, Stern also thinks that Wittgenstein only fully succeeded in giving expression to this struggle in his most carefully revised writings, in particular, in the first part of the Investigations, the dialogical structure of which allows this struggle to find its proper expression.
Both sides of the debate, Stern concludes, have been overly dogmatic, mainly because they have misread or missed the essentially dialogical character of the Investigations. But this means that not enough attention is given to the use and context of these passages.
In this way he achieved a balance between Pyrrho- nian scepticism and non-Pyrrhonian dogmatism, thereby inviting the reader to engage in a dialogue that is ultimately about the possibility of philosophy. All this is missed if we do not look at the peculiar stylistic achievement of the Investigations, Stern claims.
This still leaves us with all the hard questions, he concludes. Von Savigny begins by sketching out the following idea, which he derives from the Investigations: elements of language owe their meaning to their role in language-games, which in turn are complex behavioural regu- larities.
The linguistic elements of language-games have meaning only in so far as those language-games are substantial enough for such meaning to emerge i. He admits, however, that it is difficult to fill out this idea so as to get a substantial theory, since Wittgenstein supplies very few exam- ples of such behavioural regularities. These consequences constitute the generally accepted understanding of the utterance and thereby, von Savigny claims, determine its meaning.
Thus von Savigny finds at least the rudiments of a kind of speech-act theory in the Investigations. He goes on to ask how this insight can be applied to utterances that a speaker uses to express his mental state.
According to von Savigny, Wittgenstein considers two possibilities for how such utterances achieve a role in a language-game. The first is his well-known idea that they can replace non-verbal behaviour for instance in the process of language learn- ing. The second possibility concerns cases where there is no antecedent non- verbal expressive behaviour. In this case, the expressive behaviour begins with verbal behaviour.
Here again we find the same scheme: preconditions, avowal, and practical consequences. The precondi- tion is of course that the speaker has a history of correct announcements of his blood pressure. In that case, the meaning of the utterance is determined by the scheme which constitutes the generally accepted understanding of the utterance.
This, von Savigny claims, has stunning consequences: anyone who expresses a mental state under the right circumstances feels the way he says. Von Savigny goes on to say that a mental state does not of course have to be expressed linguistically; however, it is still determined as regards its con- tent by the generally accepted understanding of an avowal by means of which it could be expressed.
Thus we should see the extra-linguistic expressive behaviour as performing the same role as the lin- guistic behaviour, von Savigny says; what it expresses depends, once again, on the generally accepted way in which it is reacted to.
This picture can then be extended to the meaning of extra-linguistic behaviour, expressing some- thing mental that could but does not have to be expressed verbally. Von Savigny admits that we do not have to read the relevant remarks in the Inves- tigation in this way, but thinks this a plausible interpretation. Thus the mental, von Savigny says, is public for Wittgenstein in a much more radical sense than is usually assumed.
The mental is not just publicly accessible; it is as directly perceivable as behaviour, and is moreover deter- mined by this public character.
Thus whichever content a culture sees deter- mines the content of the picture. Some of the questions von Savigny takes up, especially the relation between third-person and first-person psychological utterances, are further addressed in the next paper, in which Peter Hacker deals with the problem of first- person utterances and their relation to cognitive claims.
Hacker argues that Witt- genstein proposed a grammatical elucidation to replace this view, which means that he sought to describe the grammar of first-person utterances, i. What will such a grammatical elucidation reveal? First, Hacker argues, we must distinguish between different cases of first-person psychological utter- ances. However, in other cases, Hacker tells us, for example in the case of thought, belief, expectation etc. Subsequently, he examines the rather special case of pain.
In the last part of his paper Hacker surveys some objections to the non- cognitive account he has sketched. PI II, p.
This criterial status is what the grammatical description reveals. One such topic is history, which is addressed by Hans-Johann Glock. Analytic philosophy has always been suspicious of or even hostile towards history of philosophy, and as mentioned at the beginning of our introduc- tion, the persistent misconception of Wittgenstein as a kind of analytic phi- losopher has done nothing to weaken a very ahistorical view of his philosophical work. Glock explores this tension in his paper.
Wittgenstein shares such a historiophobia with the logical positivists. Such misgivings can be detected both in the early Wittgenstein and among the logical positivists whom he influ- enced.
Wittgenstein, in contrast, could not be accused of either naturalistic or analytic historiophobia. Instead, he was always vehemently critical of the positivistic view of philosophy as something continuous with the natural sci- ences.
Indeed, many of the most important philosophers at the beginning of the last cen- tury perceived philosophy to be threatened equally by naturalism on the one hand and historicism on the other. This is why thinkers like Frege and Hus- serl considered it necessary to rethink the nature of philosophy, in some way that would make it possible to regard philosophy as neither a natural science nor one of the hermeneutic Geisteswissenschaften.
However, although Wittgenstein himself avoided the study of other philosophers and cultivated an image of himself as someone who had read almost no philosophy at all, he did not explicitly reject the possible study of other philosophers.
Even so, Glock claims that Wittgenstein should still be described as historiophobic. In addition, he was influenced by several anti-historicist thinkers, such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. As we have noted, Wittgenstein did not consider philo- sophy to be an inherently historicist enterprise. Seen in this way, philosophy starts not from the aim to provide a historical understanding of certain problems, but rather from a sense of wonder or astonishment that is not in itself historically grounded a starting point that Wittgenstein shares with Plato and Aristo- tle.
For Glock this also implies that such problems are in some sense a priori, that is, philosophy is concerned with atemporal concepts and logical struc- tures, rather than historically changing concepts. Glock identifies this dis- tinction between questions of validity and questions of historical genesis as Kantian. This also explains how Wittgenstein could be an important inspiration to historicist arguments, especially in the philosophy of science, despite his historiophobia.
Thus for example the work of Feyerabend and Kuhn builds on a Wittgensteinian idea of meaning as something that depends on practices that are subject to histor- ical change. However, especially when it comes to the nature of philosophy, it is debatable what kind of significance such change has. Wittgenstein sometimes seems to portray philosophy as something historically contin- gent, while at the same time he seems to hold that most philosophical ques- tions and problematic concepts are diachronically relatively stable, and so to speak inherent in language.
Wittgenstein claims, for instance, that it might be philo- sophically fruitful to investigate how a word is taught. But what matters is what is taught, not the mechanisms by which we are taught. Philosophical explanation, he argues, must look beyond genetic accounts; what matters is the current role of the concept.
This applies equally to scientific concepts, and thus Wittgenstein does provide some support for different historicist accounts of science and concept formation. Wittgenstein, however, did not himself engage in any kind of historicist study of conceptual change. In addition, Janik takes up a topic which, like history, Wittgenstein barely mentioned explicitly: the con- cept of rationality. Janik emphasizes that the Wittgensteinian conception of rationality is not really a new one — instead, it helps us recover an older, neglected view: the Aristotelian conception of practical reason or phronesis.
Both Aristotle and Wittgenstein insist that practical knowledge, which has to do with the ability to judge in a given situation, is constituted in action and cannot be completely articulated. This, Janik argues, can be illustrated by certain aspects of Common Law, which is based upon the idea that decisions of a higher court have the char- acter of dicta, i.
Furthermore, questions of legality are determined with reference to circumstances and sound judgement, not to a fixed body of rules. Janik argues that the kind of reasoning involved here is analogical and metaphorical rather than formal or subsumptive. Instead, rationality must be seen as a property of human action, and as such it cannot be captured by general theories, but only by reflecting on practice.
Janik says that one cannot ascribe to Wittgenstein any kind of strong relativism, which would anyway be self- refuting. As an example he mentions incompatible attitudes to food, for instance the eating of pork. Furthermore and here he agrees with Glock , Janik thinks that explaining the circumstances that have led to such incompatibil- ity is a task not for philosophy, but for history or social science.
This can only be corrected by looking at the Nachlass, rather than adhering solely to the printed texts. A point also made by M. It thus seems that any picture is in need of an expla- nation of what it is about. However, in the next passage he says that thinking can be compared to the drawing of pictures. In the third passage he presents a comprehensive view, similar to the one discussed in the first sample: the mental comprises both pictures and words.
The proof could then be thought of as a dynamic pictorial representation. For example, he seems to suggest that turning a static picture into an animated one can sometimes disambiguate it. On the other hand, this does not mean that animated pictures in themselves are unambiguous.
In this fashion, different philosophical stances to the Waismann and L. Baker, transl. Baker, M. Mackert, J. She concludes with some reflections on the implications of the existence of such a natural history for a philosophical understand- ing of the relationship between human and non-human mindedness. Bar-on draws upon both common sense and consider- ations from evolutionary biology to make her case against the continuity skeptic.
When it comes to how to think about animal minds, Tanney wants to stress the importance of common sense as well. But, unlike Bar- on, she also brings out how common sense both infuses emerging fields such as dog science and to a certain extent stands in tension with some of the remaining Cartesian dogmas about the mind that those fields have inherited.
In focusing on animals who share our homes and thus are par- ticipants in some of our most treasured and intimate normative prac- tices, her paper asks us to give philosophical weight to what we might think of as the everyday phenomenology of our lives with these creatures. In particular, drawing on Ryle and Wittgenstein, Tanney argues that men- tal predicates are internally related to the thick descriptions by which we describe the performances that puzzle us.
This position, which is as robustly anti-behaviorist as it is anti-Cartesian, invites a re-examination of the similarities and dissimilarities between species of rational animals. In particular, these serve to bring out how certain temporal aspects of language together with connections between non-verbal and verbal expression suggest a kind of mentality that goes beyond anything we can reasonably ascribe to creatures without language.
Yet this cannot account for the central role he accorded to observing and describing the variety of our practices in the context of everyday life. To provide an alternative Intro. Humean naturalism is sometimes assumed to have paved the way for scientism. There are of course important differences between Hume and Wittgenstein and between each of them and Price.
While traditional or first-order methodological naturalists seek to address philosophical problems about a topic X say, the mind, perception, or knowledge by building on scientific findings about X, Fischer argues that the new meta-philosophical naturalism by contrast invites us to contribute to the resolution of philosophical problems or debates about X by turning to scientific psychological findings about the way we think about X—in general or when doing philosophy.
They differ, or would appear to differ, how- ever, with respect to the question of naturalism. Horwich, on the other hand, apparently rejects naturalism and instead advocates what he takes as a Wittgenstein inspired rejection of theory in philoso- phy. In his paper, Knowles examines what these commitments amount to for the respective philosophers, critically evaluates the overall views Intro. Cahill they articulate, and presents his own assessment of the interrelationships between representationalism, metaphysics, naturalism, and science.
This was partly a result of his understanding of just what philosophy is; put a bit crudely, Wittgenstein saw philosophy as either metaphysics or critique of metaphysics. And once the Western metaphysical tradition had been shown up as so many multifarious illu- sions, what is left for the philosopher, let alone the profession as a whole, to do?
At present, perhaps the single most pressing problem in mainstream metaphysics would appear to be the question of the place of mind in the natural world: work must be done to mark out or make up appropriate space. Yet Ramberg wonders, what, then, is it that pragmatic naturalists actually do, once the debunk- ing lessons are learned? Once naturalism does its work on representa- tional metaphysics and philosophy of mind, can a pragmatist concern with practice, with the real problems of real human beings, provide disci- plinary direction?
Or does it amount simply to a wide-open job descrip- tion for scientifically informed intellectuals-at-large? By comparing the overlapping but distinct responses of Rorty, Price, and Kitcher, Ramberg provides us with at least a partial sketch of a post-Wittgensteinian philo- sophical landscape deflated of its traditional metaphysical ambitions. References Cavell, Stanley.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, Crary, Alice. Oxford: Blackwell, Frege, Gottlob. Meaning Without Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Hutto, Daniel D.
Ismael, Jennan. Haug, 86— Oxon and New York: Routledge, Jackson, Frank. From Metaphysics to Ethics. Oxford: Clarendon, Lewis, David. Macarthur, David. Macarthur, — New York: Columbia University Press, Maddy, Penelope. The Logical Must: Wittgenstein on Logic. McDowell, John. Mind and World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, McGinn, Marie. Haug, 62— Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York: The Free Press, Pears, David.
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