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2 results

  • 3 - Measure for measure? Wittgenstein on language-game criteria and the Paris standard metre bar

  • Edited by Arif Ahmed, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Wittgenstein's <I>Philosophical Investigations</I>
    Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    13 May 2010, pp 49-65

  • Summary

    Wittgenstein has puzzled many readers by maintaining that the standard metre bar is neither one metre nor not one metre in length. This chapter explores how the standard metre bar can possibly decide questions about whether or not anything is exactly one metre in length if it is not itself exactly one metre in length. It investigates how the logical consistency problem can be overcome without substituting predicate complementation for Wittgenstein's negation. Whether the language-game role played by the bar can be properly understood without exempting it from itself either being or not being precisely one metre long is also surveyed. The chapter answers how Wittgenstein's analogy between the bar's being neither one metre nor not one metre long is supposed to shed light on the inapplicability of existence and non-existence attributions to the 'elements' of a theory. It presents Saul A. Kripke's critique of the metre.

  • 16 - The Enormous Danger

  • Edited by William Day, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, Victor J. Krebs
  • Book:
    Seeing Wittgenstein Anew
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    15 March 2010, pp 338-356

  • Summary

    In the midst of Wittgenstein's discussion of aspect-seeing he warns us of what he calls an enormous danger. Wittgenstein's fear of wanting to make fine distinctions goes to the heart of his philosophy. Giving in to the desire to make fine distinctions may plausibly be interpreted as permitting yourself to be drawn into the deep disquietudes from which it was Wittgenstein's goal to release us. When Wittgenstein names the enormous danger, he remarks almost parenthetically, "the primitive language-game which children are taught needs no justification; attempts at justification need to be rejected". The implication is that the roots of the enormous danger rest in that old epistemological earth: the demand for justification, in particular, the demand for a justification of the difference we want to draw between seeing the figure as a duck and as a rabbit.