Wittgenstein E-Book

Michael Luntley

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 423

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In this provocatively compelling new book, Michael Luntley offers a revolutionary reading of the opening section of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations

• Critically engages with the most recent exegetical literature on Wittgenstein and other state-of-the-art philosophical work
• Encourages the re-incorporation of Wittgenstein studies into the mainstream philosophical conversation
• Has profound consequences for how we go on to read the rest of Wittgenstein’s major work
• Makes a significant contribution not only to the literature on Wittgenstein, but also to studies in philosophy of language

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title page

Preface

Introduction

I.1 Things Unravel – A Snapshot

I.2 Four Key Points

I.3 Seeing the Text Aright

I.4 Opening Methodological Remarks

I.5 Outline

1 Beginning with §1

1.1 Starting with Augustine

1.2 Three Things in Section 1

1.3 Names are Fundamental

1.4 The Wide Angle View

1.5 From the Augustinian Conception to Language Games

2 Ostensive Definition: The Shape of the Argument

2.1 Introduction

2.2 Ostension and Ostensive Definition

2.3 Two Issues: Metaphysical and Developmental

2.4 Substantive and Commonplace Roles for Ostension

2.5 Wittgenstein’s Use of “Ostensive Definition”

2.6 Wittgenstein on Learning

2.7 Ostensive Definition

3 Linguistic Regularity, Grammar and Autonomy

3.1 Introduction

3.2 Regularity and Grammar – Explanations and Travelogs

3.3 Norms, Fitness, Going Up the Garden Path

3.4 Wittgenstein’s Idealism

3.5 Platitudes – From Bold to Modest Realism

3.6 Wittgenstein’s Argument

3.7 Demonstrative Thoughts

3.8 Closing “Oughts”

4 Explanations

4.1 Introduction

4.2 Three Claims in §109

4.3 Philosophy can Offer No Explanations

4.4 Insightful Descriptions

4.5 The Sense of Fit

Appendix: What Happens to the Private Language Argument?

Bibliography

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Wittgenstein

Opening Investigations

Michael Luntley

This edition first published 2015© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Luntley, Michael, 1953– Wittgenstein : opening investigations / Michael Luntley.  pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-118-97839-9 (cloth)1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951. Philosophische Untersuchungen. I. Title. B3376.W563P532547 2015 192–dc23

2014047018

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Dreamland © harmatoslabu / iStock

for

Ava and Mabel

Preface

I have been offering classes on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations at the University of Warwick for more than twenty years. I remember a moment in one of my undergraduate classes about ten years ago. We were discussing Wittgenstein’s critique of ostensive definition and looking at the text around §§30 and 31. I remember my own internal commentary to self as the class was discussing these sections. I thought how naïve the formulation was in the text and I realized I had very little grip on what exactly the argument against ostensive definition was meant to be. I realized that I couldn’t see any interesting argument in the text. I recall a sense of wanting to move on, to move on to later sections where there was plenty to get your teeth into, real granularity of detail. I wanted to move on. I felt almost embarassed that we were supposedly looking at a powerful argument against ostensive definition as a fundamental method of assigning meaning, for I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t clear that the students could either. It wasn’t clear that there was real philosophical traction to the discussion.

It was from that moment that I stopped teaching the standard reading of how the Philosophical Investigations open. I began to read, again and again and again, the opening sections with a view to understanding what was going on as Wittgenstein invites us into the frame of his investigations. During a period of sustained sabbatical leave, I slowly re-read the Investigations several more times and gradually came to the view that I now set out, in some detail, in this short study. For the standard reading, Augustine is the foil for Wittgenstein’s potent arguments. On my reading, Augustine is not the villain in Wittgenstein’s text; he’s the good guy. Most of what he says, Wittgenstein agrees with.

Fragments of the reading that I now set out in some detail below have surfaced in a couple of recent essays of mine: ‘What’s doing? Activity, naming and Wittgenstein’s response to Augustine’ in A. Ahmed (ed.) Wittgenstein’s Investigations: a critical guide Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 30–48 and ‘Training, training, training: the making of second nature and the roots of Wittgenstein’s pragmatism’ European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy. Symposia: Wittgenstein and Pragmatism a Reassessment, 2012, 4(2), 88–104. But the present study is a sustained attempt to unpick in detail the landscape of the opening sections of the Philosophical Investigations. The appendix picks up some issues from my earlier 2003 book on Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein: Meaning and Judgement), but I have not plotted in general the points where I now depart from that earlier book. What I would now say about family resemblance, rule-following, the inner/outer distinction and so on is shaped in many different ways by the reading I set out here for the opening of Wittgenstein’s work. But the details of how all that goes must wait for another occasion.

I have been fortunate in the intellectual environment that gives the surround to my work on Wittgenstein. My sense of how Wittgenstein’s investigations can integrate with ongoing explanatory work in philosophy is richly informed by the wealth of work in the philosophy of mind and language in my immediate environment. Context matters and I have been blessed in the context I enjoy at Warwick. This has informed my thinking in all sorts of ways too subtle to fully track let alone articulate, but an early version of some of the material that now sits in Chapters 1 and 2 formed the basis for a Wednesday morning discussion group about three years ago, and I recall and acknowledge now the contributions from Naomi Eilan, Johannes Roessler, Hemdat Lerman and Guy Longworth that I took on board that day. Such acknowledgment only scratches at the surface of the powerful sense of the buzz around core issues in the philosophy of mind that reverberates around Warwick and it flows from many quarters and many colleagues. More recent discussions with Peter Poellner and Eileen John on primitive normativity and aesthetics have helped me latch onto issues that I now think are central to my reading of the Investigations.

Many more classes at Warwick, both undergraduate and postgraduate, have accompanied me on my attempt to provide a coherent reading of how Wittgenstein’s masterpiece opens. I have been opening up the Investigations to students in ways ever more distanced from the standard reading for several years now and I am grateful to all those students who took my classes and kept me on my toes. I recall recent groups, but struggle to name those from even four or five years ago, but should any of my past students find themselves looking at this book, then count yourself within the domain of those to whom I say: thank you, it was a pleasure studying Wittgenstein with you.

A recent doctoral student of mine, Seyedali Kalantari, had a particular and direct influence on my thinking. Ali was working on issues on the normativity of content and not directly engaged with Wittgenstein. But helping him get clear on the detours of a large body of work in an argument that is basically an off-shoot from Kripke, helped me enormously in framing the issues I pursue here. I was aware of those debates about normativity, but working with Ali serendipitously required that I engage more fully with that work at about the same time that I became aware of Ginsborg’s work on primitive normativity. I am still not sure if I agree with everything in Ginsborg’s 2011 seminal paper, but I think it is the most interesting contribution to discussions of normativity in the last couple of decades. Its timing was fortuitous. I found it addressing issues that I was only half aware of, but which were key to making sense of my own attempts at getting clear about Wittgenstein’s methodology.

There is one last acknowledgment that I regret I was aware of too late to give in person. When I read Pears’ two-volume study, The False Prison, I quickly assimilated a great many of the ideas contained in it. The more recent, Paradox and Platitude had a similar impact. But it has only been in the final drafting of the current work and during the delivery of my most recent graduate class on the Investigations in spring 2014 that I realized properly the extent of my debt to Pears’ work. Of all the many books on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, it is Pears’ books that I now most value and cherish. Although it falls outwith the compass of the main focus of this study, I include a short appendix on what becomes of the private language argument if my account of Wittgenstein’s treatment of ostension is right. That appendix is my defence of the core to Pears’ reading of the private language argument. It’s not quite the same as his reading, but the heart of the case owes much to his account. Pears thought the private language argument was the centrepiece of the Philosophical Investigations. Fashions change. Many now think it is not even an argument. But I think Pears was right. That appendix is a brief homage to the enormous influence that Pears has had on my own thinking.

I am indebted to the hard work and insight of two readers who read the penultimate manuscript for Blackwell. Their comments showed a care and attention to what I was doing and a perceptiveness and rigor that was a delight. Their attention to and engagement with the details of the project emboldened me to make a small number of final distillations in a handful of places to help sharpen the distinctive features of the reading on offer here.

I remember little now of how my own children first acquired the craft of using language to organize themselves, their lives and the culture in which we live. But, like most of us lucky to become grandparents, I find myself noticing much about the way that Ava and Mabel step into the imaginative arena of the language games by which we navigate our ways. This book is for them. And whether or not they ever get to be concerned by the things which I treat here, may they never lose the joy and spontaneity of their early attempts to join in the games we play with words. May they never stop wanting to explore and to go on.

down at the Sheep Dip,

July 2014

Introduction

I.1 Things Unravel – A Snapshot

Pulling on a loose thread can unravel a garment. This short monograph pulls on what looks like a very small loose thread, but one that threatens to unravel the received wisdom about how the Philosophical Investigations begin. The loose thread concerns what Wittgenstein says about ostensive definition.

Wittgenstein famously says,

… an ostensive definition explains the use – the meaning – of a word if the role the word is supposed to play in the language is already clear. (§30)

The idea of “role” concerns appropriate regularities of use. It seems right to say then that Wittgenstein holds,

ostensive definition explains the meaning of a word only if its appropriate regularities of use are already clear.

Suppose we assume that a fundamental assignment of meaning to a word is one that works independently of (or prior to) grasp of appropriate regularities of use. In that case, from (1) it follows that it is false that,