Volume 26, Issue 2

Arising from the whole body of Wittgenstein’s writings is a picture of a (not necessarily straight, linear, but admittedly tireless) journey to come to terms with the mechanics of language as an instrument to conceive ‘reality’ and to communicate an acquired conception of the ‘world’. The journey passes through mathematics, psychology, color perception, certainty, aesthetic, but, looking at it from a sort of birdview, it seems reasonable to say that these are all used as ‘test beds’ for his reflections and ‘experimentations’ towards an all encompassing perspective of such a fundamental gateway to human reasoning and life-revealing as language. Whatever labelling of Wittgenstein as a mystic, a logicist, a conventionalist, a skeptic, an anti-metaphysics, an anti-realist, a verificationist, a pragmatist, a behaviorist, and many others, does not seem to do justice to his absolute obsession with being a persistent ‘deep diver’ into the nature of language. Working with an open and searchable account of the Nachlass has allowed us to identify important aspects of the philosopher’s possible common line of thinking, in spite of changes of directions, some of them acknowledged by Wittgenstein himself. One of those aspects is the association of meaning with use, application, purpose, usefulness of symbols in language, which happens to show itself from the very beginning through to the very late writings. The German terms Gebrauch , Anwendung , Verwendung , Zweck in relation to meaning, sense of signs, words, sentences, appear in several texts since the WW1 Notebooks (1914–1916) up until very late manuscripts from 1950 to 51.

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing debates about methodological naturalism in philosophy by examining the interpretations of Wittgenstein as a naturalist philosopher. Through analyzing these interpretations, I characterize Wittgenstein’s position as a rare kind of naturalism independent of ontological or metaphysical claims. I show that what makes Wittgenstein’s naturalism methodological is its metaphilosophical thrust, which I exemplify in two interrelated features of Wittgenstein’s thought. First, the idea of philosophy’s radical autonomy prevents philosophy from committing itself to any metaphysical thesis. Second, the emphasis that Wittgenstein places on the descriptiveness of philosophy makes “general facts of nature” not the material of observation but the hinges of philosophy. Naturalism in Wittgenstein’s thought, I argue, is the precondition for philosophy as opposed to science. Since Wittgenstein’s naturalism is metaphilosophical, it is methodological: it prevents a philosopher from adopting the supernatural positions embodied in metaphysical theses. Thus, the proposed interpretation not only refines dominant views of Wittgenstein’s naturalism as liberal or liberating, but also adds to the diversity of naturalistic positions in philosophy.

This review compares two recent books, One True Logic: A Monist Manifesto, by Owen Griffiths and A. C. Paseau; and Essay on the Principles of Logic: A Defense of Logical Monism, by Michael Wolff, both professing to be defenses of logical monism. Logical pluralism is the view that differing systems of logic may be equally defensible, even though they differ on which arguments should be judged valid; logical monism is the view that only one logic is ultimately “correct.” Despite their shared conclusions, the two books reach that conclusion in strikingly different ways. The review is critical of One True Logic for dismissing “non-classical” logics out of hand, as if it were a foregone conclusion that the one correct logic is truth functional. That book is also criticized for giving specious arguments against logical pluralism. The review praises Essay on the Principles of Logic for having a more satisfactory approach. That book begins by distilling out what Kant would call a canon of pure logic. It then shows that the various logics motivating the argument for pluralism (including truth functional logic) can be explained as special applications (organons) subsumed under that broadly general canon.