[lit-ideas] Re: Sounds right to me
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2008 18:42:37 -0330
There seem to be two different questions here:
1. What did W himself actually believe regarding the status of language games
for the possibility of meaning and knowledge?
2. What does his account of language games itself presuppose regarding the
possibility of meaning and knowledge?
We distinguish between the 2 questions because it is possible that W did not
himnself understand what his account of language games actually entails.
Perhaps a question to begin with here is: "What possibilities for meaning and
knowledge are there independent of the construct of language games?" Assume
that human beings did not/ could not engage in language games, what would the
"meaning" of a word or a statement itself mean? I believe W recognized the
force of this question.
The remarks garnered together by Malcom and Von Wright as "On certainty" are
surely a testament to transcendental philosophy. The fundamental and pervasive
claim running throughout those remarks is that if you doubted the validity of
"hinge propositions," you would not be able to coherently doubt at all, nor
would you be able to make any knowledge-claims. W claimed Moore "knew nothing,"
despite his hand waving, precisely because Moore occluded the necessity and
universality of such certainties for genuine knowledge-claims.
We have here an interesting tug of war: was Witters a transcendental philosopher
who claimed that our language games constituted the possibility for meaning and
knowledge or was he a cultural anthropologist in the tradition of Geertz et al?
Walter O.
MUN
Quoting Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>:
> Walter asks
>
> > Would anyone know of a source on Wittgenstein who examines why W believed
> that
> > meaning and knowledge are not possible independent of language games, and
> what
> > W specifically meant by that claim?
>
> This may be a futile search, for that is something he did not believe;
> that is, there are no grounds for attributing such a belief to him.
>
> There's very little epistemology in Wittgenstein, unless one counts what
> he says about certainty, and claims to know such-and-such, in Über
> Gewissheit.
>
> Robert Paul
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