Lars Hertzberg

“Tell me," Wittgenstein once asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?” What would it have looked like if we looked at all sciences from the viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s philosophy? Wittgenstein is undoubtedly one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His complex body of work has been analysed by numerous scholars, from mathematicians and physicists, to philosophers, linguists, and beyond. This volume brings together some of his central perspectives as applied to the modern sciences and studies the influence they may have on the thought processes underlying science and on the world view it engenders. The contributions stem from leading scholars in philosophy, mathematics, physics, economics, psychology and human sciences; all of them have written in an accessible style that demands little specialist knowledge, whilst clearly portraying and discussing the deep issues at hand.

This essay proposes a reading of the Tractatus according to which the distinction between what can and cannot be said is to be understood in terms of the communicative function of utterances, since the sense of an utterance is not given with its physical structure but is dependent on how it is meant and taken. This dimension, however, is not explicitly present in the work. The model for what can be said, on this reading, is reports. There are other utterances that can be meaningfully made but are not report-like, such as utterances with moral force. They appear to be what Wittgenstein calls “senseless”. While reports are made from an asymmetrical position: the speaker supposedly possesses information that the listener lacks, ethical utterances are made from a relation of symmetry: the speaker invites the listener to agree but is not in a position of superiority with regard to some fact.

In Philosophical Investigations § 202 Wittgenstein writes: “‘following a rule’ is a practice.” How is this remark to be understood? What kinds of practice does Wittgenstein have in mind? The word “practice” is not used frequently in the PI, although there are numerous remarks that can be held to bear on the concept. Hardly any concrete examples are given, however, apart from the playing of games which is, in any case, not a typical form of practice. Zettel § 320 distinguishes between rules that are, in a sense, arbitrary (rules of grammar, chess) and rules that are not (cookery rules). I argue that this dichotomy is problematic. I will look at some concrete practices, such as greeting, and discuss the different senses in which they can be said to embody rules.

This paper investigates the philosophical significance of Wittgenstein’s repudiation of private language, focusing on its implications for the semantic relation between language and reality. By tracing the development of Wittgenstein’s thought from the representational theory of meaning articulated in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the use-based conception advanced in the Philosophical Investigations, the paper demonstrates that the private language argument signals a decisive break from Cartesian dualism. In rejecting the possibility of a language whose expressions are intrinsically private and grounded solely in inner experience, Wittgenstein undermines the assumption that meaning can be founded on subjective mental states. Instead, he foregrounds the constitutive role of public criteria, communal practices, and rule-governed language games in establishing meaning. The paper contends that Wittgenstein’s argument is not merely a critique of the internal aspect of semantics but a fundamental reconfiguration of the mind–world relation, one that dissolves the inner/outer dichotomy, neutralizes the threat of skepticism, and reconceives linguistic meaning as inherently social and external. This shift, it is argued, lies at the heart of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and challenges foundational assumptions in traditional representationalist accounts of meaning.

In the interpretive literature from the 1950's through the 1970's the term 'criterion' was thought to be a central key to the understanding of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Later on, it was relegated from this place of honour to being one of a variety of expressions used by Wittgenstein in dealing with philosophical questions. This Element tries to account for the shifting fate of this concept. It discusses the various occurrences of the word “criteria” in the Philosophical Investigations, argues that the post-Wittgensteinian debate about criteria was put on the wrong track by a problematic passage in Wittgenstein's early Blue Book, and finally gives an overview of the main contributions to this debate, trying to achieve a reconciliation between the rival conceptions.

We are all familiar with robots and other computers producing linguistic expressions. The essay discusses the question in what sense these speech-like phenomena can be regarded as an outcome of what might be called learning to talk. The question might also be rephrased as follows: in what sense can a talking robot be considered a speaker. In the debate becoming a speaker is often construed as an ability to connect signs with objects. As was shown by Wittgenstein this conception of being a speaker is highly impoverished. To be a speaker is to be able to express oneself by means of words. This ability is connected with having a life, which robots lack. What concerns me in this discussion is not so much the ongoing debate about what robots can and cannot do. Rather, it is the light it may throw on what it means for a human being to learn to talk.

Peter Winch, following Wittgenstein, was critical of the notion that philosophy could pass judgment on matters like the sense of words, the rationality of actions, or the validity of arguments. His critique had both what we might call a local strand – the insight that criteria of thought and action are not universal but vary between cultures and between practices – and a personal strand – the insight that those local criteria are ultimately given shape through the particular applications made of them by individuals. These strands are prominent, for instance, in Winch’s discussion of cross-cultural understanding as well as his treatment of the distinction between valid reasoning and illicit persuasion.

Some analytic philosophers, notably Donald Davidson, have argued that natural languages must be compositional, i. e. the meanings of sentences in the language depend exclusively on their syntax and the meanings of their simple parts. This has been taken to be a precondition for the language being learnable. In this essay, it is argued that the compositionalist account of language learning is untenable. On the one hand, the idea that the understanding of sentences derives from the understanding of component parts is circular. On the other hand, the compositionalist account fails to address the question how in learning to speak we come to use words to express our concerns and to participate in contexts of communicative interaction. Furthermore, in construing the ability to make ourselves understood as an ability to fulfil standards of linguistic correctness, the compositionalist view fails to do justice to the actual conditions of human linguistic interaction.