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The Complexity of Wittgenstein's Methods

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2008

Rom Harré
Rom Harré
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington
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Abstract

In claiming to draw out an inconsistency between Wittgenstein's declarations on method and his actual practice, John Cook argues that Wittgenstein retained a radical distinction between material things (bricks) and immaterial things (spooks). I argue that on the contrary Wittgenstein showed in detail how this dichotomy is to be rejected in favour of a spectrum of more or less ‘minded' beings, at one pole of which are persons as animated bodies. Discussing the grammar of ‘know', Cook claims that Wittgenstein depended on philosophers' distinctions rather than a surview of vernacular uses. I argue that it was the expression/description distinction that Wittgenstein used to make sense of the grammar of ‘know'.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 83 , Issue 2 , April 2008 , pp. 255 - 265
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2008

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References

1 John W. Cook. ‘Did Wittgenstein Practise What he Preached?' Philosophy 81 (2006), 45.

2 John W. Cook. ‘Did Wittgenstein Speak With the Vulgar or Think With the Learned? Or Did He Do Both?' Philosophy 82 (2007), 209–239.

3 Cook op cit. note 1 p. 451.

4 Cook op cit. note 1 pp. 453–461.

5 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953) § 244 ff.

6 Bricks, favoured by Cook as exemplars of gross materiality, are nothing of the sort. They are artefacts presupposing the intentional activities of intelligent and skilful beings acting on material stuff.

7 A clock set into a life-size stuffed leather effigy of Elvis was recently on sale at a furniture showroom in Arlington, Virginia. On the hour it played ‘Hound Dog'.

8 All further PI references are to the paragraphs of the Philosophical Investigations, op. cit.

9 My emphasis.

10 Cook, op. cit. note 2, 222.

11 This way of interpreting the property of indexicality derives from the ethnomethological principle that the meaning of such expressions is tied to a specific context of utterance including time, place and speaker. See for example Rom Harré and Peter Mühlhäusler, Pronouns and People (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).

12 On Certainty. Trans. D. Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979). § 341, §343.

13 This work has been very fully examined in D. Moyal-Sharrock, Understanding Wittgenstein's On Certainty (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

14 Cook, op. cit. note 2, 224.

15 Cook, loc. cit.