Stefan Riegelnik

In the collection Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (I, §149) Wittgenstein encourages us to imagine a group of people selling wood at a price relative to the area covered by the pile of wood irrespective of the height of the pile. In “Wittgenstein and Logical Necessity” Barry Stroud argues that Wittgenstein uses this scenario to steer between two untenable positions: (i) Frege’s Platonism, according to which the wood sellers must be considered to be insane, and (ii) a version of conventionalism which leaves open the possibility of ways of inferring, counting, and calculating different to ours. At first sight, the behaviour of the wood sellers seems to be comprehensible. But, as Stroud argues, the more we project our grammatical structures and categories into their verbal and non-verbal behaviour, the less intelligible the wood sellers become. In what follows, I discuss Stroud’s account of the unintelligibility of the wood sellers and I contrast it with Johan Canfield’s critical reading of this verdict.

What is it for predicates to mean what they do and what is their contribution to the meaning of an utterance? It is exactly this question to which Davidson dedicates his book Truth and Predication. Most commentators focus on Davidson’s discussion of failed accounts, in particular of Frege’s account. In contrast to this tendency, I focus here on Davidson’s own account. The structure is as follows. First, I sketch the problem of predication and I glance at Davidson’s discussion of failed accounts. Then I present his solution and integrate it in his theory of interpretation, thereby bringing out the particularity of the account. In doing so I shall scru- tinize some criticisms as well, for as I intend to show, they originate from a wrong understanding of his com- prehensive theory of interpretation.