Laurence Goldstein

(1947 - 2014)

According to some commentators, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is all one big joke: we plough through the text trying to extract the sense out of each spare and heroic proposition, only to be told at the end, that anyone who understands the author will realize that all of his propositions are nonsensical and so are not even propositions. The whole work is a kind of hoax; the readers are ridiculed, but, with luck, will eventually have to laugh when they come to recognize that what they had taken for deep philosophy was all so much gibberish. As a result of this revelation, they will be cured for ever of the urge to philosophize.

Wittgenstein discusses speakers exploiting context to inject meaning into the sentences that they use. One facet of situation comedy is context-injected ambiguity, where scriptwriters artfully construct situations such that, because of conflicting contextual clues, a character, though uttering a sentence that contains neither ambiguous words nor amphibolous contruction may plausibly be interpreted in at least two distinct ways. This highlights an important distinction between the (concise) sentence that a speaker uses and what the speaker means, the disclosure of which may require considerable spelling out. Understanding this phenomenon of nonindexical contextualism is the key to solving, inter alia , problems where, puzzlingly, exchanging a singular term in a statement with a co-referential one fails to preserve truth-value. This is a rare case where there is a huge debate in the recent literature that is decisively settled by Wittgenstein’s approach.