The Unity of Wittgenstein's Philosophy: Necessity, Intelligibility, and Normativity

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION Until recently it was almost universally1 assumed in the literature on Wittgenstein that he developed two radically different philosophies, which found expression in his two main works, the Tractatus and the Investigations. Accordingly, the task for those interested in the evolution of Wittgenstein’s thought was to explain the radical shift from his early to his later philosophy. Recent interpretations, however, have called into question the myth of the two Wittgensteins. Cora Diamond (1991), James Conant (1991b, 1998), and their followers (cf. A. Crary and R. Read [2000]) have argued persuasively that there is a unitary core in Wittgenstein’s philosophy that runs from the Tractatus to the Investigations, a unique way of tackling philosophical problems and working toward their dissolution. But although of late many commentators have emphasized the unity of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, this new line of interpretation still needs to be supported by a detailed account of the unity in the development of Wittgenstein’s thought.2 In this book I try to articulate such an account, examining how the stable core of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is developed from the Tractatus to the Investigations.3 The developmental story that I tell, however, is not the story of the unfolding of a single view,4 but rather, the story of an ongoing philosophical conversation (or monologue) and its internal logic. As we shall see, Wittgenstein was an experimental philosopher who was always trying out new ways of thinking and resolving philosophical issues; and the different views that he elaborated at different stages in his career were always work in progress, transitional but never final sketches. I will argue that what gives unity and continuity to this experimental thinking is a set of themes and a particular way of approaching them. My developmental account will try to uncover both the thematic and the methodological unity of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. In the first place, I will try to show that what is at the core of Wittgenstein ’s philosophy in all its stages is a constant preoccupation with two 1 2 Introduction interrelated themes—namely, necessity and intelligibility. Throughout his career Wittgenstein tried to dispel the metaphysical illusions concerning necessity that arise from the misguided attempt to find room for the necessary and the impossible in a world of contingency. Throughout his career he argued (in a variety of ways) that necessity does not concern the metaphysical structure of the world, but rather, the normative structure of language . He thought that all philosophical problems about necessity can be dissolved by means of an elucidation of ordinary language use. Thus, on Wittgenstein’s view, the issue of necessity is bound up with the issue of the normativity of language, which concerns the distinction between sense and nonsense, between admissible and inadmissible combinations of signs. Throughout his career Wittgenstein tried to resist philosophical misconceptions concerning what can and cannot be said. Here too his primary aim was to debunk metaphysical illusions that arise when we depart from ordinary language, in this case by detaching the distinction between sense and nonsense from our ordinary ways of talking. In the second place, I will argue that there is a strong methodological unity underlying the different treatments of these themes that Wittgenstein offered throughout his career. From the Tractatus to the Investigations Wittgenstein adopted a deflationary approach to tackle philosophical problems concerning necessity and intelligibility. More importantly yet, Wittgenstein ’s deflationary approach always relied on the same strategy—namely, contextualism. He identified decontextualization as the main source of philosophical confusions and argued that we can only achieve philosophical understanding by situating our ideas or concepts in the contexts in which they function. As we shall see, this is what his logical and grammatical elucidations of ordinary language try to achieve: to demystify concepts (such as “meaning” and “necessity”) by viewing them against the background of our ordinary uses of language, that is, “to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (PI §116). It was Wittgenstein’s view throughout his career that this contextualist strategy is what enables us to deflate philosophical notions and dissolve the problems associated with them. However, the notion of context undergoes change in the development of Wittgenstein’s thought. Initially Wittgenstein thought that the context that was the proper object of his philosophical elucidations was a logical context: what he called the “logical space” in which propositions signify, or the “logical scaffolding” surrounding our statements (cf. Tractatus 3.42). Later he contended that the context that needed...