The Struggle Against Dogmatism: Wittgenstein and the Concept of Philosophy

Oskari Kuusela - Marie McGinn
One of the most perplexing, and to some irritating, aspects of Wittgenstein's later philosophy is his apparent insistence that he is not putting forward philosophical theses, or making any claim with which others could possibly disagree or which it is possible to dispute. It can be hard to see how this can be understood as anything other than an attempt by Wittgenstein to privilege his own conceptions of meaning or of psychological phenomena, or as a claim to the absolute and indisputable correctness of his observations on rules, understanding, sensations, the propositions of mathematics, and so on. The idea that Wittgenstein's later philosophy is in some way implicitly dogmatic has been encouraged by interpretations, such as the one developed in great detail by Peter Hacker and Gordon Baker in their commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, which hold that Wittgenstein does not put forward theses insofar as he is merely describing the rules for the use of expressions; his remarks are held to be indisputable insofar as anyone who understands the relevant expressions must agree to Wittgenstein's descriptions, and recognize that any deviation from them inevitably results in nonsense. On this conception of it, the kind of conceptual investigation that Wittgenstein is engaged in results in the articulation of the grammatical rules implicit in our use of expressions, and provides a base from which unanswerable criticisms of the use that philosophers make of the expressions of our language can be mounted. Wittgenstein's idea that his aim is to make philosophical problems 'completely disappear' is, on this interpretation, taken to be equivalent to an intention to show that they one and all depend upon a demonstrably deviant, and therefore nonsensical, employment of words.