Wittgenstein, McDowell and Therapeutic Philosophy

Abstract

<p>Kripke argues via an interpretation of Wittgenstein that any speaker's claim to have meant something determinate by an utterance is vulnerable to a sceptical chal1enge. The rules pertaining to the meaning of one's words can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways, and there can thus be no objective fact about one's past mental history that can be invoked to authoritatively determine what one meant. McDowell states that the sceptical problem dissolves if we cease to look at the meaning of words on the model of interpreting signs, and instead see meaning as emerging from the communal practice of individuals who have been trained into reacting in customary ways to linguistic signs. This allows for an anti-sceptical or "therapeutic" position according to which there is no philosophical problem with respect to one's grasping the meaning of a speaker's words. We face a potential problem, however, with respect to how linguistic signs have determinate identities. This is because a sign can only be followed if it is recognized as a sign, but it can only be recognized as a sign if there is a custom of reacting to it in regularly patterned ways. The key to avoiding this paradox and preserving a therapeutic outlook is to see the forms of our language as being intimately bound up with our form of life in a conceptual feedback loop, to the effect that we reach a point at which explanations for why our words mean what they do come to an end. We simply do what we do, and observe that "this language-game is played." This implies that the fundamental level of our language-games is normative rather than being reducible to descriptive accounts of our sub-rational interactions with the world. Moreover, experience of ''the world" emerges only for one who has been initiated into a language. Hence, what we say is directly constrained by the way things are in the world, and common-sense objectivity can be comfortably accepted.</p>