117 Notes ; Notes 1. Wittgenstein’s Rejection of Realism versus Semantic Antirealism 1. The term “language game” has been so widely used that a word of clarification is in order as to what I mean by it and how finely individuated I take language games to be. As I will be using the phrase here, “language game” will refer to any area of discourse which employs methods of investigating and testing that are unique to that discourse. Some examples would include: the language game played by historians, the language game played by social scientists , and the language game played by the scientific community. And I take language games to be individuated in roughly the way that these examples are. Of course, numerous other language games can also be found in more common activities that we engage in. The important point is that the concept of a language game is grounded in human activity: as Wittgenstein says, “the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence that the speaking of language is an important activity or a form of life” (P.I. #23). Or, as Ronald Bienert puts this point, “the concept of a language game entails the concept of human activities containing language. These particular human activities are fundamental to a particular use of language that is isolated in a particular language game and so are fundamental for that particular language game” (Wittgenstein’s Concept of a Language Game [Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1996], p. 265). I would also like to remark here that I will be using the term “language game” primarily as an epistemological concept: in our various language games, we go about testing statements in different ways and we accept our statements as true upon different kinds of grounds. This interpretation of the concept of a language game is supported by remarks such as “What counts as an adequate test of a statement belongs . . . to the description of the language game”(O.C. #82) and “The kind of certainty is the kind of language game” (P.I., p. 224). Wittgenstein also uses the term “language game” as a more exclusively semantic concept, i.e., as a way of opposing the Tractarian meaning theory. But (with the 117 118 Wittgenstein’s Account of Truth exception of a few parts of part 2) that is not the sense in which I will use the term here. For a fuller discussion of Wittgenstein’s concept of a language game, see Ernst Specht’s The Foundations of Wittgenstein’s Late Philosophy (Manchester : Manchester University, 1969) and Ronald Bienert’s unpublished dissertation , Wittgenstein’s Concept of a Language Game. 2. The reader may recognize the reference to the concept of a rulefollowing practice as one possible route to the antirealist reading of Wittgenstein. The notion that a rejection of truth conditions in favor of justification conditions is implicit in Wittgenstein’s discussion of following a rule was first suggested by Saul Kripke in his Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982). Kripke argues that because there can be no fact about an individual nor any fact about the world in virtue of which he could mean addition by “+,” there can be no such thing as meaning something by a word. He then suggests the following “skeptical solution” to this skeptical paradox about meaning: according to him, Wittgenstein holds that what allows us to say of any individual that he means addition by “+” is that he uses it in accordance with his community. It is not that the community’s agreement makes an answer to a given addition problem obviously correct or that a statement such as “3 + 3 = 6” is true. Rather, Wittgenstein is supposed to hold that if this is the answer that everyone gives, no one will feel justified in calling the answer wrong. In other words, Kripke thinks that when Wittgenstein rejected the view in the Tractatus that a statement gets its meaning by virtue of its truth condition or by virtue of its correspondence to facts that must obtain if it is true, he proposed a theory of meaning based not on truth conditions but on justification conditions or assertibility conditions: under what circumstances are we allowed to make a given assertion? (Kripke, 1982, p. 74). Since Kripke’s initial presentation of this view, a vast literature has sprung up arguing for and against an antirealist reading of Wittgenstein based on rule-following considerations (see...