Volume 10, Issue 1

Little is known about the origins of the Brown Book of Ludwig Wittgenstein. One of his better-known texts, it was first published in print in 1958 and is based on notes that Wittgenstein had dictated to two of his pupils, Francis Skinner and Alice Ambrose, at Cambridge University during the academic year of 1934 – 35. The present paper examines some of the few extant remarks by Wittgenstein and others about the circumstances from which the text emerged against the backdrop of various source materials, including a set of handwritten and typed notes that belong to a collection of Ambrose’s papers at Cambridge University Library.

In his treatises A Defence of Common Sense (1925), Proof of an External World (1939), and Certainty (1941), G.E. Moore wanted to put an end to the modern doubts about the certainty of reality and the ‘external world’ by pointing to the undeniable plausibilities of ‘empirical propositions,’ such as ‘I know that this is my hand’ or ‘I know that the earth had existed before my body was born.’ Wittgenstein, who was intensely grappling with Moore’s proofs during the last one and a half years before his expected death, still questioned these proofs and countered them with his concept of language games – including a different logic of the ‘connection with reality.’ Philosophically, he thereby left many loose ends in all places and admittedly a ‘gap’ between them, which he was no longer able to close. But he prepared for closing the gap by means of his concept of orientation, which he had initiated in his Philosophical Investigations without defining it in this term. In a new interpretation of On Certainty from the perspective of the Philosophy of Orientation, this paper tries to show how the attention to the phenomenon of orientation and the language game in which it is expressed can close this gap and thus carry on Wittgenstein's late philosophy to a certain point.

In this paper I focus on a major aspect of the later Wittgenstein’s investigation of thinking – his discussion of the idea of thinking as a process or an activity. I shall show that Wittgenstein’s remarks, apart from some concerning the methodology and conception of philosophy, are grammatical remarks, meaning that they describe the use of the word “thinking” and can be agreed to by every competent speaker. I thus show that Wittgenstein’s investigation of thinking is a grammatical one, and hence that there is no inconsistency between his conception of philosophy and his philosophical practice. In the process of doing so, I shall also review previous studies on this topic and point out their deficiencies.

This article examines the relation between the philosophy of language proposed by the later Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations , and his ambition to cure philosophy from the mapping of linguistic expressions to extra-linguistic entities, on the one hand, and Chomsky's statements regarding language, meaning, and thought, and regarding the sense and non-sense of different fields of linguistic research, on the other. After a brief descriptive comparison of both approaches, it is argued that Chomsky's criticism on Wittgenstein's theory of meaning (Chomsky 1974 – 1996), or on Wittgenstein's basic concepts such as e. g. rule-following (Chomsky 2000 onwards), respectively, is (a) unwarranted and (b) caused by a fundamental misconception. Moreover, it is argued that the hypothesis evoked by Grewendorf (1985: 126), according to which „Chomsky would like to explain what Wittgenstein describes“, is misleading since the objects of investigation of Chomsky and Wittgenstein are in complementary distribution one to the other.

In his Remarks on Colour Wittgenstein repeatedly mentions that white glass is necessarily non-transparent. However, Wittgenstein does not provide convincing evidence for this thesis. He touches on several disanalogies between white and coloured glass, but the coherence of these disanalogies is occasionally somewhat overestimated. Wittgenstein's remarks on transparent white glass appear incomplete and I am not aware of any philosophical works that closes the gaps in his remarks on transparent white. This paper will try to close at least one of these gaps and show to what extent there is a conceptual link between white and non-transparency.

The paper presents the resources offered by the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB) on Wittgenstein Source. Moreover, it describes the conditions for their use. Finally, the paper also briefly introduces WAB’s “Nachlass transcriptions” site from which all of WAB’s transcriptions of the Wittgenstein Nachlass can be downloaded, and the tool WiTTFind which permits lemmatized online search in the entire Nachlass and is the result of more than five years of close cooperation between WAB and the Centrum für Informations- und Sprachverarbeitung (CIS) at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität München.

In this introductory piece I summarize the aims and contents of the special section on Wittgenstein and Applied Epistemology, which consists of a selection of papers presented at the 6 th Symposium of the International Ludwig Wittgenstein Society that took place at the Nova University of Lisbon in 2017. After explaining the sense in which “applied epistemology” is here employed in connection with Wittgenstein’s thought, brief comments are made on papers by Natalie Alana Ashton, Anna Boncompagni, Marco Brusotti, Michel Le Du, Andrew Lugg, Sofia Miguens, Constantine Sandis, Genia Schönbaumsfeld, and Vicente Sanfélix Vidarte and Chon Tejedor.

In this paper I make the case for a feminist hinge epistemology in three steps. My first step is to explain hinge epistemologies as contemporary epistemologies that take Wittgenstein’s work in On Certainty as their starting point. My second step is to make three criticisms of this literature as it currently stands. My third step is to introduce feminist epistemologies, which argue that social factors like race and gender affect what different people and groups justifiably believe, and argue that developing a feminist hinge epistemology is both plausible (because of important similarities between the two kinds of views) and desirable (because feminist epistemologies have resources which can help hinge epistemologies to avoid the three problems that I have raised).

This paper makes use of the Wittgenstein-inspired perspective of hinge epistemology in connection with research on epistemic injustice. Its aim is to shed light on the neglected relationship between hinges and prejudices, by focussing on the role of the “radical doubter” in epistemic practices. After the introduction, section 1 presents Miranda Fricker’s (2007) seminal work and points out that epistemic injustice typically involves the silence of discriminated groups, an aspect that emerges with most clarity when the figure of the doubter is considered. This is further investigated in section 2 with the examination of the film “Twelve Angry Men”, by Sidney Lumet. Some unsolved problems posed by Lumet’s film, rotating around the notion of reasonable doubt, are addressed in the following section through the Wittgensteinian metaphor of hinges as developed in hinge epistemology. Finally, by bringing together epistemic injustice and hinge epistemology, section 4 puts to the fore the importance of cultivating the capacity of attention towards radical doubters for understanding one’s own prejudices and promoting social transformations.

How do we know the position and movements of our limbs? Wittgenstein repeatedly deals with one received answer to this epistemological question: our ‘kinaesthetic sensations’ teach us about our posture and movements. However, he does not reject only this specific solution. He puts into question the very idea of an epistemology of bodily awareness. His critical arguments are not simply reductionist, but neither are they “mainly introspective”, and nor does he lean towards a “perceptual view” (Harcourt). The paper also touches upon the issue of how Wittgenstein's views relate to Anscombe’s much discussed claim that one ordinarily knows the position of one’s limbs “without observation”.

The idea that the brain has mental properties is widely accepted among psychologists and cognitive scientists. Nevertheless, mental properties are usually attributed to persons. This paper aims at elucidating the reasons why, in various contexts, attributing psychological properties to the brain seems the natural thing to do. It also insists that the very idea of locating thoughts is pointless: expressions such as thinking in the head , calculating in the head should not be understood as mentioning locations. Furthermore, the paper tries to show that many proposed solutions to the mind/brain problem are misguided by the belief that the brain thinks and suggests a different answer to this problem, inspired by several remarks by Wittgenstein and by Kenny’s distinction between mental abilities and their vehicle. In many respects, this answer is more a dissolution than a solution to the problem.

Science figured in no small way in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, not least in his remarks about representation. Early and late he regarded theories like Newtonian mechanics as means of representing the world rather than as representations. While the notion of a form of representation looms largest in his early writings, it also informs his later remarks. His appropriation of the mathematical physicist’s conception of representation is as fundamental to Remarks on Colour (1950) as to the Tractatus (1918/1922).

Although many philosophers have, throughout history, regarded themselves as answering the skeptic, the question arises whether answering the skeptic is the thing to do. If not, the question becomes how else to respond to her. Wittgenstein-inspired stances are, in general, therapeutic. In this article I focus on the problem of other minds in order to analyze and compare the different shapes such therapeutic stances may have. I begin by showing how crucial resisting the temptation to answer the skeptic was for John McDowell’s early formulations of disjunctivism in the 1980s. In his article “Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge” I identify substantial positions such as the rejection of highest common factor views, the diagnosis of the connection between such highest common factor views and an (untenable) conception of appearances, as well as the proposal of a non-Cartesian, or modest, approach to indistinguishability for a subject. Whatever his success in these other enterprises, McDowell continues to regard both the temptation to answer the skeptic and a substitute therapeutic stance as epistemologically motivated. But if skepticism is more than an intellectual conundrum, as maintained by Stanley Cavell, the source of such temptation has to be considered in a completely different light.

Wittgenstein teaches us that, contrary to current philosophical and scientific trends, the understanding of others is not to be achieved through some kind of emotional tool providing an access-pass to otherwise hidden ‘mental contents’. This insight goes against the popular grain of empathy as a form of informational ‘mindreading’, founded upon John Locke’s assumption that understanding another is a matter of obtaining and decoding the stored in their mind. We would do best to replace this radically distorted account of what it takes to understand others with a stance that places priority on shared aspects of our lives. Only then can we even begin to try and tackle our moral, cultural, religious, and socio-political differences.

In this paper I distinguish between ‘local’ and ‘global’ forms of ‘envatment’. I show that recent envatment arguments (the ‘local’ variety) work similarly to arguments from perceptual illusion and that neither of them are able, by themselves, to get us ‘global’ scepticism. Consequently, motivating the radical sceptical idea that all of our perceptual beliefs might be false is harder than it looks.

In this paper, we defend the view that, although Wittgenstein does not present an epistemology of religion in the sense of the term most commonly found in traditional philosophical texts, he does explore a different understanding of religious epistemology – one that aligns the religious attitude with a particular form of know-how.