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What Might not be Nonsense

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Douglas G. Winblad
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Extract

For Wittgenstein, as Cora Diamond interprets him in the essays collected in her recent The Realistic Spirit, there are no logical truths, and a host of other linguistic constructions, such as ‘A is an object’ are, contrary to appearances, nonsensical. In what follows, after outlining Diamond's account I argue that the position she ascribes to Wittgenstein is incoherent. I also reject some possible responses to this charge, among them an appeal to the distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy , Volume 68 , Issue 266 , October 1993 , pp. 549 - 557
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1993

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References

1 Diamond, Cora, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, Mass., and London: The MIT Press, 1991).Google Scholar

2 Diamond, Cora, ‘Wittgenstein and Metaphysics,’ in The Realistic Spirit, p. 30.Google Scholar We are to interpret ‘understanding’ antipsychologistically. For a related interpretation of Frege's view of logical categories, see Sluga, Hans, Gottlob Frege (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).Google Scholar

3 Diamond, Cora, ‘Throwing Away the Ladder,’ in The Realistic Spirit, p. 185.Google Scholar See Frege, Gottlob, ‘On Sense and Reference,’ translated by Black, Max, in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, edited by Geach, Peter and Black, Max (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952).Google Scholar

4 See ‘On Sense and Reference,’ p. 70Google Scholar, for Frege's ad hoc solution: assigning to vacuous names the reference zero.

5 ‘Throwing Away the Ladder,’ p. 191. Cf. pp. 192, 193 and 201.Google Scholar

6 Russell, Bertrand, ‘On Denoting,’ in Logic and Knowledge, Marsh, Robert C., (ed.), (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956).Google Scholar

7 See, e.g., Frege, Gottlob, ‘On Concept and Object’, translated by Peter Geach, in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, p. 54.Google Scholar

8 See ‘Wittgenstein and Metaphysics’, pp. 30–32Google Scholar, and ‘What Does a Concept-Script Do,’ in The Realistic Spirit, pp. 131–132.Google Scholar

9 ‘Throwing Away the Ladder,’ pp. 196–197.Google Scholar

10 Diamond, Cora, ‘Frege and Nonsense,’ in The Realistic Spirit, p. 84.Google Scholar

11 Diamond, Cora, ‘What Nonsense Might Be,’ in The Realistic Spirit, p. 106.Google Scholar

12 Ibid. p. 106. And see Frege, Gottlob, Foundations of Arithmetic, 2nd edn., translated by Austin, J. L. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), x.Google Scholar

13 ‘Frege and Nonsense,’ 78.Google Scholar

14 ‘Throwing Away the Ladder’, p. 194Google Scholar; cf. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with an English translation by Ogden, C. K. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 4.1121.Google Scholar

15 ‘Throwing Away the Ladder’, 192–193.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., 192.

17 Ibid., 192.

18 ‘Wittgenstein and Metaphysics’, 19.Google Scholar

19 ‘Throwing Away the Ladder’, 202–203.Google Scholar

20 ‘Wittgenstein and Metaphysics’, 20.Google Scholar

21 ‘Throwing Away the Ladder’, 185.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., 194, 198.

23 Ibid., 181, 194.

24 Ibid., 196.

25 Diamond, Cora, ‘What Does a Concept-Script Do?,’ in The Realistic Spirit, pp. 140–141.Google Scholar Cf. Hacker, P. M. S., Insight and Illusion, revised ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 19–22.Google Scholar

26 ‘Throwing Away the Ladder’, 202.Google Scholar

27 Tractatus, 7.Google Scholar

28 This paper was read at the annual meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology in New Orleans, 1993. I am grateful to Randall Havas, C. Grant Luckhardt, Edward Minar, Carol Mickett, Neil Thomason, and my colleagues at Vassar College—particularly Jennifer Church and Michael Gehman—for helpful comments.