Charles J. Abaté

In the course of my investigation, I examine and compare what is generally understood as "the private language argument" with certain passages in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations which I take to constitute the skeleton of a private object argument, and I attempt to show how the two arguments are related, and to what extent. Appealing to various passages in the Investigations, I attempt to construct, from Wittgenstein's often cryptic remarks, a more explicitly stated hypothesis about the privacy of objects and their relation to language and meaning. ;Subsequently, I argue that Quine's indeterminacy thesis reflects a remarkable expansion of Wittgenstein's theme concerning private objects. I suggest that Quine has assimilated the private object argument into his metaphysical scheme, and radicalized its conclusion to demonstrate its applicability not only to the objects of the "inner soul", but to objects of the "external world" as well. I then attempt to illustrate how the general theme of both Wittgenstein and Quine represents nothing less than a rather far-reaching theory of objectivity--a striking hypothesis about the concept of an object. ;I proceed to examine some of the commitments of this theory with respect to our ideas about Realism and ontology. I then consider two recent attacks on what I take to be the central theme of the Wittgensteinian-Quinean theory of objectivity. I argue that these two attacks are at best inconclusive, and I suggest some responses to these attacks which could be proposed by Wittgenstein and Quine. ;Finally, I propose a very brief argument against the Wittgensteinian-Quinean theory of objectivity which seems to me to prove much more troublesome than the traditional arguments which have been levied against Wittgenstein and Quine. This argument proves troublesome not because it establishes the falsity or incoherence of the Wittgensteinian-Quinean metaphysical scheme, but rather because it appears to uncover a fundamental misunderstanding of the Wittgensteinian-Quinean position by most of the very proponents and followers of that tradition. There is good reason, in fact, for thinking that Wittgenstein, at least--if not Quine also--was not himself confused about his philosophical tenets, and that the argument which I examine reflects on the questionable assumptions of many of his misguided followers rather than his own positions

Should engineering ethics be taught? Despite the obvious truism that we all want our students to be moral engineers who practice virtuous professional behavior, I argue, in this article that the question itself obscures several ambiguities that prompt preliminary resolution. Upon clarification of these ambiguities, and an attempt to delineate key issues that make the question a philosophically interesting one, I conclude that engineering ethics not only should not, but cannot, be taught if we understand “teaching engineering ethics” to mean training engineers to be moral individuals (as some advocates seem to have proposed). However, I also conclude that there is a justification to teaching engineering ethics, insofar as we are able to clearly identify the most desirable and efficacious pedagogical approach to the subject area, which I propose to be a case study-based format that utilizes the principle of human cognitive pattern recognition