Tomasz Zarębski

In this interview, Tomasz Zarębski speaks with Allan Janik, co-author of _Wittgenstein’s Vienna_ (1973, with Stephen Toulmin), on the occasion of the 50 th anniversary of the publication of this pathbreaking book. The conversation concerns the circumstances, motivations and reasons for his undertaking the work on the book, as well as its reception and place in Wittgenstein scholarship. A large part of the discussion refers to his perspective of Wittgenstein, Toulmin’s philosophical writings, and Janik’s own vision of philosophy. The interview took place in Innsbruck on 23 rd and 25 th August 2023.

Maria Kokoszyńska-Lutmanowa (1906-1981) was a Polish philosopher and student of Kazimierz Twardowski, the founder of the Lvov-Warsaw School. In 1938 she went to the University of Cambridge (Newnham College) on a Sarah Smitton Fellowship. There she attended George Edward Moore’s lectures as well as one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics in 1939. In this interview which was conducted with Alois Eder she talks about her encounter with Wittgenstein. It was published in 1978 in the Polish art and culture magazine Odra and is her only published memoir about Wittgenstein. The interview is republished here both in English translation and as facsimile of the original publication with the kind permission of the Odra magazine.

The article combines later Wittgenstein’s fictitious language games, along with the forms of life associated with them, with the concept of otherness and places them both within the philosophy of education. The account of otherness overlaps with the view of fictional language games in that the latter deviates from our ordinary, extant uses of language and our Lebensform, and thus can be perceived as extraordinary, unusual, strange, and sometimes nonsensical. The advantages of dealing with such construed preposterousness rely, first, on its leading to a better understanding of our own form of life; second, on its opening a window on the changing of our form of life; third, on its acquainting us with the other. The educational roles of it are presented, first, as being needed at the very beginning of a child’s language learning, when the learner probes the limits of sense and thus enters the domain of otherness; second, as freeing children from the tyranny of adults’ norms and showing the norms that adults accept as absurd; thirdly, as puzzlement that gives an impulse to our thought development, which occurs in contact with the other. Therefore, it is claimed that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy opens perspectives on educational thinking not only in terms of teacher training (Abrichtung) of the learner to follow the rules of existing practices, but also in terms of imagination and critical attitude towards the existing forms of life.

The article raises the issue of the relationship between Hilary Putnam’s externalist semantics, with a focus on the concepts of deixis and deictic (ostensive) definition, and Robert B. Brandom’s semantic inferentialism, with a focus on the concepts of observational, noninferential reports and of anaphoric reference and their roles in a broader inferential practice. The analysis of the two respective conceptions shows that despite the differences in philosophical background and terminology, Putnam’s and Brandom’s considerations largely overlap as to their views on reference and ostensive definition, especially in the context of introducing a novel term into a language by a scientist. Either philosopher agrees, first, that the bare act of indicating does not play any semantically constitutive role unless it has some conceptual load and it is used in a sentence, at least such as “This is X”; second, in their accepting semantic holism; third, in their admitting the social aspect of meaning-formation, along with their approving that the constituting of meaning of perceptual, observational terms proceeds in close contact of the language with reality.

Ludwig Wittgenstein is widely known to have held the view that language has no essence, i.e. that no particular language game is more constitutive of our ability to speak than others. One of the first critical discussions opposing the stance that Wittgenstein had taken, was delivered by Rush Rhees in his “Wittgenstein’s Builders”. Rhees warns us against letting the metaphor of language as a game go too far, and thus “seduce” us —which supposedly happened to Wittgenstein. Instead, he argues that apart from different particular functions that language may serve, it has to have something that secures the unity of discourse and that can be called its essence. He sees this crucial element in “discourse” or “conversation”. In his justification of such a view, Rhees advances some hints, though not developed into a thorough elaboration, which may be read in an inferentialist spirit. Displaying such features as semantic holism, propositionalism, essentialism and —as the present paper suggests —a rudimentary version of inferentialism, Rhees’ deliberations tally with Brandom’s philosophical project. Thus, the paper is intended to analyse these features as a background for Brandom’s wider conception.

The paper explores two pivotal concepts of Moore’s philosophy: sense data and immediate knowledge, examining their mutual relations. While the concept of sense data is commonly known and has often been extensively discussed, that of immediate knowledge is usually not explicitly mentioned. Nevertheless, Moore, in his arguments for the philosophy of common sense (e.g. in A Defence of Common Sense or Proof of an External World ), often referred to examples of empirical knowledge that can be defined as immediate knowledge, i.e. knowledge acquired directly, not inferentially, and constituting a foundation for drawing all further conclusions concerning the empirical world, e.g. “Here is one hand”. The opposite of it is mediate knowledge, which is always a result of inferring from statements expressing bits of immediate knowledge. Although the two terms in question rarely appear explicite in Moore, they are widely discussed in his lectures from 1910—1911, published only in 1953 as Some Main Problems of Philosophy . The present analysis refers mostly to this work