Search Results

This chapter develops a symmetry between one simple form of Wittgenstein's private language argument against internalism and standard internalist complaints rooted in explanation and introspection, for instance arguments of McKinsey and Boghossian. It argues that all of these negative arguments should be answered by internalists and externalists through the same strategy. It also develops a positive account of our introspective access to our thoughts, partly by contrast with Wright's work.

Professor Saul Kripke argued that the ‘real’ private language argument terminates with section 202 of the Investigations and is concerned with the logical and epistemological character of following a rule. According to his interpretation, Wittgenstein is propounding a sceptical paradox concerning rule following, which he resolves by means of a Humean answer. Careful examination of Wittgenstein’s text and of his preparatory notebooks shows this interpretation to be very far from anything Wittgenstein intended.

This chapter attempts to provide further motivation for the model of deontic constraint proposed in the previous chapter, by filling in some of the background that informs the way that philosophers use the terms “belief” and “desire.” The central difference between rational choice theorists and philosophers, in this regard, is that the latter think of beliefs and desires as propositional attitudes, and thus as fundamentally sentence-like in nature. Adopting this linguistically-informed perspective lends much greater plausibility to the introduction of principles as a third category of intentional state. Support for the view that all intentional states should be thought of as deontic statuses is presented.

This chapter examines externalism rooted in theoretical claims about the content of language-mediated thought, especially by a focus on Davidson's truth-based theory and Brandom's use-based theory. It also considers other form of interpretationism, and many forms of Wittgenstein's private language argument. It develops an internalist response to these various externalist theories and arguments, which involves incorporation of internalist variants of their various externalist mechanisms.

This chapter explores the analogy proposed by Thomas Reid between testimony and sense perception. It begins by trying to arrive at a correct understanding of the two principles he identifies as fundamental to our acquiring information from others: the principles of veracity and credulity. Next, it investigates the similarities Reid finds between perception and testimony considered as mechanisms of belief formation. Finally, it investigates whether the analogy between perception and testimony can be extended from psychology into epistemology. In particular, it discusses whether beliefs based on testimony, like beliefs based on sense perception, may be regarded as epistemologically basic or foundational. It concludes that although Reid's answer is yes (testimonial fundamentalism), the correct answer is no (testimonial reductionism).

This chapter rejects its own prior interpretation Wittgenstein’s discussions of private language, according to which Wittgenstein’s goal is to provide an argument intended to establish the thesis that a private language is impossible. The chapter here argues that Wittgenstein’s aim is importantly different: it is to show that the very idea of a private language lacks coherent content. The primary error Wittgenstein’s readers too often commit, according to this chapter, is to mistake some of Wittgenstein’s grammatical remarks for philosophical remarks. Wittgenstein urges throughout his later work that mistaking a grammatical claim for a philosophical one is a common source of philosophical confusion. The grammatical claims the chapter has in mind in this case are some of the claims Wittgenstein makes using expressions such as “obeying a rule,” “private,” and “sensations.”

Argues that normativity can only exist for interacting individuals. The various individualistic responses to the communitarian position regarding rule‐following fail without exception. Moreover, of different communitarian views the most plausible and defensible is this: an individual is able to follow a rule only if the individual is currently a participating member of a group in which the very same rule is followed by other members. It is this thesis that ultimately supports the communitarian epistemology proposed in this book. It is also the thesis which informs the views of language, truth, and objectivity that connect with this epistemology.

Cora Diamond has claimed that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus contains an early ‘private language argument’: an argument that private objects in other people’s minds can play no role in the language I use for talking about their sensations. She further claims that the Tractatus contains an early version of the later idea that an inner process stands in need of outward criteria. The chapter argues against these claims, on the grounds that they depend on an unwarranted construal of the Tractatus’s notion of use. It is further argued that Diamond’s interpretation makes a mystery of the relation between the Tractatus and Wittgenstein’s 1929 account of sensation language, set out in Philosophical Remarks and elsewhere. Finally, the chapter considers and defends Michael Dummett’s contention that the Tractatus is a paradigm of semantic realism, in the light of Diamond’s claim that the Tractatus in fact suggests a form of anti-realism about sensation language.

This chapter gathers together the various elements of the correct internalist theory, which is called qualia empiricism. It shows how such a theory can reply to one characteristic form of private language argument. And it contrasts this proposal with relatively close competitor proposals by Chalmers and Yablo. It propounds a kind of semantic two-dimensionalism, and is less centered on epistemological concerns than traditional forms of empiricism.

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein revolutionized twentieth-century philosophy of language; with The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow created a new novelistic style. LeMahieu suggests that despite their obvious generic differences, the revolutionary impact of the late Wittgenstein and the early Bellow gains its force from similar stylistic innovations. Both texts break with their respective authors’ earlier works and also with prevailing modernist dogma by employing a demotic voice. LeMahieu argues that the private language argument, one of the nodal points of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, offers a way of understanding the stylistic contradictions of Bellow’s work. Wittgenstein asks his readers to consider a language that refers “to what can only be known to the person speaking” and that remains inaccessible to any second person. Bellow’s novels dramatize Wittgenstein’s image of “human beings who spoke only in monologue.” The problem faced by Bellows’s protagonists as they seek to recover experiences of shared humanity in order to employ them ethically in a social contract is precisely the one Wittgenstein addresses in his private language argument: how to refer to a private feeling experienced in the past and go on to use it as a standard applicable to future emotion and behavior.

Wittgenstein related the concept of following a rule with the limitations of a private language in his “private language argument.” This chapter attempts to answer a few of the questions that arose from this argument: is rule-following, or more specifically, having a language, necessarily social in character? Is his argument valid only for a language that cannot be taught to others? Wittgenstein’s argument referred not only to a private language, but to “private objects” in general; this perhaps implies that something cannot be taught to another without a common ground of experience. A “revisionist” view would point out that an abstract pre-social language is conceptualized wherein the language pre-exists and will have been created by its users.

Explores the structure of phenomenal concepts. It examines how far they are expressed by everyday words, compares them to perceptual concepts, develops a quotational model of their workings, considers how far they give rise to incorrigible judgements, and discusses whether they violate Wittgenstein's “private language argument”.

In conclusion, we look at the how the three paradigms of consciousness that run through the book indicate different ways of conceiving the problem of consciousness and the relation of the mind with the body. Classical Aristotelian, modern Cartesian, and contemporary linguistic paradigms are discussed and an example of an Indian paradigm is studied in detail to show how alternative perspectives can bring out interesting assumptions and viable distinctions to similar questions on the nature of the mind and the self. What different paradigms give us are tools to grasp philosophical problems, this book is an attempt to bring forth precisely those tools and the respective vocabulary to articulate some of the nagging issues that which have persisted in philosophical thought over a long period of time.