Showing papers in "Philosophical Investigations in 2004"

Is Knowing‐how Simply a Case of Knowing‐that?

Abstract: Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson have argued that there is no fundamental distinction between what Gilbert Ryle famously called ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’, and that the former can be treated as a special kind of the latter. I will endeavour to show that sentences of the form ‘a knows how to F’ are ambiguous between a reading in which we ascribe knowledge-that to a and another in which we ascribe something to a which is irreducible to any kind of knowledge-that and can most appropriately be characterized as an ability. The authors’ attempt to reduce also the latter reading to an ascription of knowledge-that fails because it rests on an unexplained conception of practical modes of presentation.

The End(s) of Philosophy: Rhetoric, Therapy and Wittgenstein's Pyrrhonism

Abstract: In Culture and Value Wittgenstein remarks: ‘Thoughts that are at peace. That's what someone who philosophizes yearns for’. The desire for such conceptual tranquillity is a recurrent theme in Wittgenstein's work, and especially in his later ‘grammatical-therapeutic’ philosophy. Some commentators (notably Rush Rhees and C. G. Luckhardt) have cautioned that emphasising this facet of Wittgenstein's work ‘trivialises’ philosophy – something which is at odds with Wittgenstein's own philosophical ‘seriousness’ (in particular his insistence that philosophy demands that one ‘Go the bloody hard way’). Drawing on a number of correlations between Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy and that of the Pyrrhonian Sceptics, in this paper I defend a strong ‘therapeutic’ reading of Wittgenstein, and show how this can be maintained without ‘trivialising’ philosophy.

Wittgenstein on The Standard Metre

Abstract: In this paper I argue that Wittgenstein is correct when he says of the Standard Metre stick that we can neither say that it is or is not a metre in length – despite what our intuitions may tell us to the contrary. Specifically, the paper deals with Kripke's criticism of Wittgenstein's claim in Naming And Necessity and with Salmon's attempt to arbitrate between the two views. I conclude that, not only is Wittgenstein correct, but that both Kripke and Salmon (and possibly the majority of philosophers) simply do not understand the concept of measurement.

‘Meaning is Use’ in the Tractatus

Abstract: Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not treat of dashes on a bit of paper Frege’s idea could be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life And the same, of course, could be said of any proposition: Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would be an utterly dead and trivial thing And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use (Blue Book, p 4)

A Religious Point of View

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to show connections between Wittgenstein's approach to philosophy and the writings on religion of two authors whom we know Wittgenstein read and admired: William James and Leo Tolstoy. Wittgenstein stresses certain attitudes toward philosophical ‘problems’ which resemble the attitudes that James and Tolstoy connect with religious faith. There are also similarities of phrases and expressions. It is not possible to say that these writers influenced the way Wittgenstein regarded philosophy, but it suggests that he recognized the similarities between their approaches and his despite the differences in subject. Consequently it helps to clarify why he would speak of his approach to problems as being from ‘a religious point of view’ even though its orientation is not specifically religious.

Kinds of Context: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Proper Names and Indexicals

Abstract: Let us begin with my name. We substitute ‘B.R.’ for ‘I’ or ‘you’ or ‘he’, as the case may be, because ‘B.R.’ is a public appellation, appearing on my passport and my identity card. If a policeman says “Who are you?” I might reply saying “Look! this is who I am”, but this information is not what the policeman wants, so I produce my identity card and he is satisfied. (Russell; 1948: 101) In this paper I shall concentrate on two linguistic tools: proper names and indexicals. Proper names such as ‘David Seaman’, ‘Paris’, ‘San Marino’, etc. can be viewed as tools enabling us to label people, objects, places, etc. and to collect and pass information about the individuals so named. Their proper function is to enable the speaker and audience to collect information about individuals and to keep track of them. Since we are not omniscient beings, we are precluded from knowing individuals and keeping track of them under all their properties across time. We are thus in the need of a tool of reference differing from a descriptive method of identification. In other words, we need linguistic tools that allow us to pick out objects and keep track of them, not by virtue of their contingent and ephemeral properties, but simply by working as tags for these objects. Proper names play this specific role. On the other hand, indexicals such as ‘now’, ‘here’, ‘today’, ‘this’, ‘she’, ‘I’, etc. can be viewed as tools enabling us to single out objects, periods, locations, persons, etc.

The Origins of Wittgenstein's Imaginary Scenarios: Something Old, Something New

Abstract: The imaginary scenarios that appear in nearly every work of the later Wittgenstein – ones involving laughing cattle, disembodied eyes that see, and the like – are decidedly absent from the Tractatus. What necessitated this change in methodology? A comparison of the Tractatus with the Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein's first major work after his return to philosophy, reveals that these devices are the product of something old and something new. The rationale for these devices is already present in the notion of a “propositional variable,” but Wittgenstein had little use for them until he rejected the phenomenological language and laconic style of the Tractatus.

Faith, Belief and Perspective: Peter Winch's Philosophy of Religion

Abstract: Peter Winch's philosophy of religion is controversial, accused of mere “perspectivism” and fideism, and for avoiding discussion of any existential reference for the object of belief. This essay examines what Winch meant by a “perspective.” It first deals with problems of first person propositions of belief. For Wittgenstein and Winch belief and the fact it believes are inextricably bound together. Thus Winch argues that what is said cannot be divorced from the situation of the sayer; understanding requires making shifts in perspective. Finally I compare Winch's use of religious language to Augustine's doctrine of the “inner word,” arguing that there are important parallels in Winch to pre-Lockean theological understandings of faith.

Goodness Beyond Speech

Abstract: The article addresses Raimond Gaita's attempt to construe the ethical in terms of a notion of speech that is tied to presence (each of us, he holds, is called to become someone ‘authentically present in speech and deed’ (Gaita 1991, p. 145)), a notion through which he articulates a sense both of human uniqueness – speech demands that one find one's own words – and of human fellowship: to find one's words is to achieve the depth that enables one to be taken seriously by others. The article argues, however, that the notion of speech is caught in a double bind; for it requires a spontaneity that is incompatible with the self-presence that it also requires. In a way that Gaita cannot acknowledge, goodness is beyond speech.

Idealism and Williams's Semantic Paradox

Abstract: Bernard Williams's essay ‘Wittgenstein and Idealism’ argues that that the conventionality of language entails the dependence of the truth of sentences and ultimately of corresponding states of affairs as truth-makers on the existence of thinking subjects. Peter Winch and Colin Lyas try to avoid William's paradox by distinguishing between the existence conditions of a sentence and its assertion. The Winch-Lyas solution is criticized and a stronger Winch-Lays resistant version of Williams's paradox is proposed. A more satisfactory countercriticism is given, involving an ineliminable modal fallacy occurring in the paradox inference, that arises because of the argument's invalid combination of categorical and counterfactual assumptions and conclusions.