Merrill Ring

So many times have we heard it told and even recounted it ourselves, that the tale of Descartes’ metaphysical adventure is something we can slip our philosophical feet into without feeling the slightest pinch. The story, or perhaps, only its plot, is this: Descartes, in order to discover whether anything is certain, attempted to doubt everything; though he succeeded in casting at least a shadow of doubt on vast areas of belief, happily one item, though only one, emerged from the inquiry in a respectable condition, indubitable. The remainder of the tale relates how he proceeded to deduce truth after truth from that single original certainty.

In the Investigations, #s 371 and 373, Wittgenstein said: “Essence is expressed by grammar” and “Grammar tells what kind of object anything is …”. Those passages, which commit Wittgenstein to holding that things have essences and which offer an account of what essences consist in, have been ignored by commentators, chiefly because it is thought that in #65ff (family resemblances) Wittgenstein rejected essentialism. The aim of this paper is to straighten out the story of Wittgenstein's thought on the subject of essence and to show that he produced (somewhat following in Kant's footsteps) a major change in the conception of an essence.

When Wittgenstein said psychology contains conceptual confusions and experimental results, one item he had in mind was the psycho-physiological theory of kinaesthesis, which offers an account of how we know limb movement and position. The aim of this essay is to develop and evaluate the objections to that theory which have been produced by Wittgenstein, Melden and Anscombe. That project involves specifying clearly what is involved in the theory, resolving various disagreements between the critics, showing the pattern of the objections, and lastly evaluating the success of the case against the theory. That case amounts to the thesis that the kinaesthetic sensations we do have simply are not adequate to the evidential burden placed on them by the theory. Unless one thinks that they must constitute such evidence no one would have thought that they do so.

When Wittgenstein said psychology contains conceptual confusions and experimental results, one item he had in mind was the psycho-physiological theory of kinaesthesis, which offers an account of how we know limb movement and position. The aim of this essay is to develop and evaluate the objections to that theory which have been produced by Wittgenstein, Melden and Anscombe. That project involves specifying clearly what is involved in the theory, resolving various disagreements between the critics, showing the pattern of the objections, and lastly evaluating the success of the case against the theory. That case amounts to the thesis that the kinaesthetic sensations we do have simply are not adequate to the evidential burden placed on them by the theory. Unless one thinks that they must constitute such evidence (the piece of conceptual confusion) no one would have thought that they do so.

When Wittgenstein said psychology contains conceptual confusions and experimental results, one item he had in mind was the psycho-physiological theory of kinaesthesis, which offers an account of how we know limb movement and position. The aim of this essay is to develop and evaluate the objections to that theory which have been produced by Wittgenstein, Melden and Anscombe. That project involves specifying clearly what is involved in the theory, resolving various disagreements between the critics, showing the pattern of the objections, and lastly evaluating the success of the case against the theory. That case amounts to the thesis that the kinaesthetic sensations we do have simply are not adequate to the evidential burden placed on them by the theory. Unless one thinks that they must constitute such evidence (the piece of conceptual confusion) no one would have thought that they do so