Articles
"Understanding Misunderstanding", in Carla Carmona, David Perez-Chico & Chon Tejedor (eds.), Intercultural Understanding after Wittgenstein, Anthem. 2023.
Wittgenstein seeks to throw light on our concept of understanding by looking at how misunderstandings arise and what kinds of failure they involve. He discerns a peculiar sort of misunderstanding in the writings of the social anthropologist James Frazer. In Frazer’s hands, the anthropological project of enabling us to understand human behavior seems to yield the result that there are certain forms of human behavior that simply cannot be understood. The source of Frazer’s misunderstanding, according to Wittgenstein, is that he places narrow requirements on what could count as meaningful, prior to and independently of his encounter with the subjects of his interpretation. Frazer, like some of the philosophers Wittgenstein addresses in his other works, succumbs to nonsense in his very attempt to draw the limits of sense. My aim in this chapter is to clarify the connections between Wittgenstein’s criticism of Frazer and his criticism of his fellow philosophers, in particular of Frege. The materials I draw on stem from various periods in Wittgenstein’s career, and they reveal, in my mind, an important continuity in Wittgenstein’s thought: addressing misunderstanding, in Wittgenstein’s view, is fundamentally an ethical problem, not a theoretical one.
"Truth and the Limits of Ethical Thought: Reading Wittgenstein with Diamond", in Jens Pier (ed.), Limits of Intelligibility: Issues from Kant and Wittgenstein, Routledge. 2023.
This chapter investigates how a reading of Wittgenstein along the lines laid out by Cora Diamond makes room for a novel approach to ethical truth. Following Diamond, I develop the connection between the kinds of elucidatory propositions by means of which we spell out and maintain the shape of our theoretical thinking, such as “‘someone’ is not the name of someone” and “five plus seven equals twelve,” and the kind of propositions by means of which we spell out and maintain the shape of ethical thinking, such as “slavery is unjust.” As Diamond points out in connection with the last example, this is a proposition that we take to be an undeniable truth; for anyone who would attempt to negate it would become unintelligible to us. In this sense this ethical truth spells out the limits of ethical thinking. And yet what counts as coherent thought about such matters tends to shift over time. Indeed the great difficulty of overcoming ethical disagreements has to do with the fact that what is at stake in them is not just the content, but the form and limits of thought. Nonetheless, Diamond proposes that ethical propositions may count as genuine truths. For this to make sense, a middle path between realism and relativism must be found. In order to show how this is possible, and in order to defend Diamond’s view, I propose to approach ethical truth by means of a disjunctivist strategy. On this approach, while we, just as much as our interlocutor, may at times be misled in our ethical thinking, and while we may at times fail to shape our ethical thought in ways that prevent us from gaining clarity on ethical matters, this does not detract from the fact that we may at times be right, and that we may then genuinely possess ethical truth.
"Nonsense: A Riddle Without Solution", forthcoming in James Conant & Gilad Nir (eds.), Early Analytic Philosophy: Origins and Transformations.
This paper concerns Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophical and mathematical problems. Both in his earlier and in his later writings Wittgenstein grapples with the tendency of philosophers to misconstrue the nature of the difficulties that they are facing. Whereas philosophers tend to assume that their problems are comparable to those that come up in the sciences, and take these problems to consist in questions the answers to which will provide them with substantive knowledge, Wittgenstein compares philosophical problems with riddles. What is characteristic of riddles is that solving them involves an alteration of the use of language, but it does not tend to involve the acquisition of new knowledge. In his middle and later period, the comparison with riddles serves to highlight and resolve a related confusion in the way philosophers of mathematics understand the nature of mathematical problems. Wittgenstein rejects the realist approach according to which every mathematical theorem, whether proven or not, meaningfully specifies a possible fact which would make it true or false. By contrast, Wittgenstein construes unproven conjectures on the model of riddle phrases, whose meaning, prior to our finding the solution to them, has not been determined. Moreover, Wittgenstein draws our attention to the fact that we can be caught up in an attempt to solve a riddle even if the riddle does not have a solution; the same applies, in his mind, to our engagement with philosophical and mathematical problems. When it comes to philosophical riddles, Wittgenstein is convinced that they do not have a solution at all. The specific difficulty presented by unproven mathematical conjectures is different; in this case, we cannot tell in advance whether or not they present us with a solvable riddle. The paper situates these issues in the context of ongoing debates in the scholarship concerning Wittgenstein’s conception of nonsense, his methodology, his engagement with mathematical realism and verificationism, and his response to skepticism.
"Wittgenstein’s Reductio", in Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy
Penultimate draft available here.
“‘In a certain sense we cannot make mistakes in logic’: Wittgenstein, Psychologism and the So-Called Normativity of Logic”, in: Disputatio 10 (18) (2021): One Hundred Years Thinking the Tractatus. Penultimate draft available here.
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus construes the nature of reasoning in a manner which sharply conflicts with the conventional wisdom that logic is normative, not descriptive of thought. For although we sometimes seem to reason incorrectly, Wittgenstein denies that we can make logical mistakes (5.473). My aim in this paper is to show that the Tractatus provides us with good reasons to rethink some of the central assumptions that are standardly made in thinking about the relation between logic and thought. In particular, the rejection of logical mistakes is to be understood in connection with Wittgenstein’s non–psychological approach to the thinking subject (5.641). On Wittgenstein’s view, inference, understanding, and meaning are holistically related; cases of defective reasoning are to be explained in terms of a defective grasp of meaning which manifests in an indeterminate use of signs. Invalid reasoning therefore does not count for Wittgenstein as a species of reasoning, but rather as the mere illusion of reasoning. The rejection of logical mistakes thus gives voice to a radical disjunctivist approach.The notion of the riddle plays a pivotal role in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. By examining the comparisons he draws between philosophical problems and riddles, this paper offers a reassessment of the aims and methods of the book. Solving an ordinary riddle does not consist in learning a new fact; what it requires is that we transform the way we use words. Similarly, Wittgenstein proposes to transform the way philosophers understand the nature of their problems. But since he holds that these problems are ultimately unsolvable, rather than attempting to solve the riddles of philosophy, he aims to dissolve them.
Both Heidegger and the early Wittgenstein investigate the possibility of a philosophical inquiry of an absolutely universal scope — of the being of all beings, in Heidegger’s case, and of the logical form of everything that can be meaningfully said, in Wittgenstein’s. Moreover, they both raise the worry that the theoretical languages by means of which we speak of particulars beings and assert particular facts are not suited to this philosophical task. And yet their own philosophical works seem to include many assertions of ordinary, theoretical language. Are they being inconsistent? Or are they hoping to use theoretical language in a way that conveys what cannot be said in that language? Much of the scholarship on each of these thinkers’ work takes the form of one of the horns of this dilemma. In the context of Wittgenstein scholarship, however, a third alternative has been proposed within the context of the resolute reading of the Tractatus. In this paper I seek to establish the availability of a similar solution to Heidegger’s predicament. Having rejected the possibility of a theoretical account of being, Heidegger’s goal is to lead to a transformation of our fundamental relation to being and hence of our way of life. His aims are in this sense not theoretical, but ultimately practical.
The fundamental error of the metaphysical tradition, according to Heidegger, is the subordination of general ontology to the ontology of a special, exemplary entity (God, the soul, etc.). But Being and Time itself treats one kind of entity as exemplary, namely Dasein. Does this mean that Heidegger fails to free himself from the kind of metaphysics that he sought to criticize? I show that to avoid this, Heidegger proposes to pursue a “double task” in Being and Time. Alongside the task of fundamental ontology, Heidegger spells out the shape of a second task, Destruktion, understood as a historical critique that traces ontological concepts back to their ontic roots. Destruktion is not a mere addendum to fundamental ontology; the two tasks are meant to counterbalance one another and thereby prevent the collapse of the ontological difference between being and beings. Indeed, Heidegger proposes to apply Destruktion to the results of his own fundamental ontology. He hopes to thereby achieve a transformation of the philosophical attitude which underpins the metaphysical tradition.
In paragraph 5.132 of the Tractatus Wittgenstein argues that the justification of inference depends solely on the understanding of the premises and conclusions, and is not mediated by any further act. He then goes on to reject what he calls Frege’s and Russell’s “laws of inference”. This line of argument is puzzling for two reasons. First, it is unclear that there could be any viable account of the justificatory nature of inference in which no such mediation takes place. Second, it is clear that if the mediation of premises and conclusion took the form of adding a premise to the inference, this would give rise to a regress. But Frege’s and Russell’s accounts of rules of inference are carefully designed to avoid such a regress. It might appear, then, that Wittgenstein’s critique doubly fails; my paper aims to dispel this appearance.
