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Austerity, Psychology, and the Intelligibility of Nonsense
- Philosophical Topics
- University of Arkansas Press
- Volume 42, Number 2, Fall 2014
- pp. 161-199
- Article
- Additional Information
This paper explores difficulties that resolute readers of the early Wittgenstein face, arising out of what I call the ‘sheer lack’ interpretation of their ‘austere’ conception of nonsense, and the intelligibility of philosophical confusion—there being a sense in which we rightly talk of a ‘grasp’ of philosophical nonsense and indeed of its ‘logic’. Such readers depict philosophical and ‘plain’ nonsense as distinct psychological kinds; but I argue that the ‘intelligibility’ of philosophical confusion remains invisible to the kind of psychology that the ‘sheer lack’ interpretation would make available to Wittgenstein. These concerns relate to well-established worries concerning whether the