Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning Volume 1 of an Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, Part I: Essays

by Baker, Gordon P.; Hacker, P. M. S.

• ISBN13: 9781405199247
• ISBN10: 1405199245
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-12-14
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This is a much revised and extended new edition of Part I of the first volume of the monumental four-volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations. Takes into account much new material that was unavailable when the first edition was written Following Baker's death in 2002, P.M.S. Hacker has rewritten many essays completely Part I: Essays now includes two completely new essays: 'Meaning and Use' and 'The Recantation of a Metaphysician'; the essays: 'The Augustinian Conception of Language', 'The Language-Game Method', 'Contextual Dicta and Contextual Principles', 'Philosophy', 'Surveyability and Surveyable Representations', and 'Truth and the General Propositional Form' are redrafted and expanded, incorporating new source materials and new arguments, as well as taking into account debates of the last quarter of a century The accompanying Part II: Exegesis 1-184 - has been thoroughly revised in the light of the electronic publication of Wittgenstein's Nachlass, and includes many new interpretations of the remarks, a history of the composition of the Philosophical Investigations and an overview of its structure. The revisions will ensure that this remains the definitive reference work on Wittgenstein's masterpiece for the foreseeable future

Author Biography

G.P.Baker was a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford from 1967 until his death in 2002. He is the co-author with P.M.S. Hacker of the first two volumes of the four-volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell, 1980–96), author of Wittgenstein, Frege and the Vienna Circle (Blackwell, 1988) and with Katherine Morris of Descartes’ Dualism (1996). He also wrote numerous articles on Wittgenstein, Frege, Russell, Waismann and Descartes.

P.M.S. Hacker is the leading authority on the philosophy of Wittgenstein. He is author of the four-volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, the first two volumes co-authored with G.P. Baker (Blackwell, 1980–96) and of Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth-century Analytic Philosophy (Blackwell, 1996). His other previous works include The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Blackwell, 2003) and History of Cognitive Neuroscience (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), both co-authored with M.R. Bennett. Most recently he has published Human Nature: The Categorical Framework (Blackwell, 2007), the first volume of a trilogy on human nature.Together with Joachim Schulte, he has produced the 4^th edition and extensively revised translation of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming 2009).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. xi
Introduction to Part I: Essays	p. xiii
Note to the paperback edition 2009	p. xix
Abbreviations	p. xx
The Augustinian conception of language (§1)	p. 1
Augustine's picture	p. 1
The Augustinian family	p. 4
word-meaning	p. 4
correlating words with meanings	p. 6
ostensive explanation	p. 7
metapsychological corollaries	p. 9
sentence-meaning	p. 11
Moving off in new directions	p. 14
Frege	p. 19
Russell	p. 23
The Tractatus	p. 26
Explanation (§6)	p. 29
Training, teaching and explaining	p. 29
Explanation and meaning	p. 33
Explanation and grammar	p. 35
Explanation and understanding	p. 39
The language-game method (§7)	p. 45
The emergence of the game analogy	p. 45
An intermediate phase: comparisons with invented calculi	p. 54
The emergence of the language-game method	p. 57
Invented language-games	p. 61
Natural language-games	p. 63
Descriptions and the uses of sentences (§18)	p. 65
Flying in the face of the facts	p. 65
Sentences as descriptions of facts: surface-grammatical paraphrase	p. 67
Sentences as descriptions: depth-grammatical analysis and descriptive contents	p. 70
Sentences as instruments	p. 73
Assertions, questions, commands make contact in language	p. 76
Ostensive definition and its ramifications (§28)	p. 81
Connecting language and reality	p. 81
The range and limits of ostensive explanations	p. 83
The normativity of ostensive definition	p. 88
Samples	p. 92
Misunderstandings resolved	p. 97
Samples and simples	p. 103
Indexicals (§39)	p. 107
Logically proper names (§39)	p. 113
Russell	p. 113
The Tractatus	p. 117
The criticisms of the Investigations: assailing the motivation	p. 120
The criticisms of the Investigations: real proper names and simple names	p. 124
Meaning and use (§43)	p. 129
The concept of meaning	p. 129
Setting the stage	p. 136
Wittgenstein: meaning and its internal relations	p. 144
Qualifications	p. 152
Contextual dicta and contextual principles (§50)	p. 159
The problems of a principle	p. 159
Frege	p. 164
The Tractatus	p. 170
After the Tractatus	p. 171
Compositional theories of meaning	p. 173
Computational theories of understanding	p. 181
The standard metre (§50)	p. 189
The rudiments of measurement	p. 189
The standard metre and canonical samples	p. 192
Fixing the reference or explaining the meaning?	p. 193
Defusing paradoxes	p. 197
Family resemblance (§65)	p. 201
Background: definition, logical constituents and analysis	p. 201
Family resemblance: precursors and anticipations	p. 208
Family resemblance: a minimalist interpretation	p. 212
Sapping the defences of orthodoxy	p. 216
Problems about family-resemblance concepts	p. 219
Psychological concepts	p. 222
Formal concepts	p. 224
Proper names (§79)	p. 227
Stage-setting	p. 227
Frege and Russell: simple abbreviation theories	p. 230
Cluster theories of proper names	p. 233
Some general principles	p. 235
Some critical consequences	p. 238
The significance of proper names	p. 239
Proper names and meaning	p. 244
Turning the inquiry round: the recantation of a metaphysician (§89)	p. 251
Reorienting the investigation	p. 251
The sublime vision	p. 253
Diagnosis: projecting the mode of representation on to what is represented	p. 256
Idealizing the prototype	p. 259
Misunderstanding the role of the Ideal	p. 263
Turning the inquiry round	p. 266
Philosophy (§109)	p. 271
A revolution in philosophy	p. 271
The sources of philosophical problems	p. 277
The goals of philosophy: conceptual geography and intellectual therapy	p. 284
The difficulty of philosophy	p. 287
The methods of philosophy	p. 290
Negative corollaries	p. 294
Misunderstandings	p. 299
Retrospect: the Tractatus and the Investigations	p. 303
Surveyability and surveyable representations (§122)	p. 307
Surveyability	p. 307
Precursors: Hertz, Boltzmann, Ernst, Goethe, Spengler	p. 311
The morphological method and the difficulty of surveying grammar	p. 320
Surveyable representations	p. 326
Truth and the general propositional form (§134)	p. 335
The demands of the picture theory	p. 335
'That's the way the cookie crumbles'	p. 340
'...do we have a single concept of proposition?' (PG 112)	p. 344
'...the use of the words "true" and "false" ... belongs to our concept "proposition" but does not fit it...' (PI §136)	p. 346
Truth, correspondence and multi-valued logic	p. 349
Understanding and ability (§143)	p. 357
The place of the education of understanding in the Investigations	p. 357
Meaning and understanding as the soul of signs	p. 359
Categorial misconceptions of understanding	p. 362
Categorial clarification	p. 367
Understanding is not an experience	p. 368
Understanding is not a process	p. 369
Understanding is not a mental state	p. 371
Understanding is neither a dispositional state of the brain nor a disposition	p. 373
Powers and abilities	p. 375
Understanding and ability	p. 380
Index	p. 387
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