Truth, yardsticks and language-games

Philosophical Investigations

Volumn 19, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 105-130

  Harrison, Bernard ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF UTAH   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34248794919     PISSN: 01900536     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9205.1996.tb00414.x     Document Type: Article

References (14)

1. In Lepore, Ernest, ed., Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives in the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Oxford: Blackwell (1986), 92-100
2. Max Black, A Companion to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1964), p. 183
3. It has been suggested to me that the target of 4.063 might well be the tendency on the part of Russell, around 1905/6, to treat 'true' and 'false' as names of unanalysable properties, somewhat in the manner of Moore's treatment of 'good' in Principia Ethica, and having, incidentally, also like Moore's non-natural intrinsic properties, essential connections with the ethical: tendencies manifest, for example, in the following passage from 'Meinong's Theory of Complexes and Assumptions' (Russell, ed. Lackey, Essays in Analysis, London: Allen and Unwin (1973), p. 76), drawn to my attention by R. R. Rockingham Gill. "Thus the analogy with red and white roses seems, in the end, to express the matter as nearly as possible. What is truth, and what falsehood, we must merely apprehend, for both seem incapable of analysis. And as for the preference which most people -so long as they are not annoyed by instances -feel in favour of true propositions, this must be based, apparently, upon an ultimate ethical proposition: 'it is good to believe true propositions, and bad to believe false ones'. This proposition, it is to be hoped, is true; but if it is not, there is no reason to think we do ill in believing it." There is certainly something to be said for this suggestion. If the argument of 4.063 is directed against the proposal that 'true' and 'false' name properties it is a fortiori an argument against the main claim advanced by Russell in the above passage. But I remain unpersuaded that the argument is directed primarily against Russell
4. Anscombe (An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, London: Hutchinson, 1959, 58-59) agrees with Black, contrary to the sense of Wittgenstein's text, that the point on the paper corresponds to a Fregean 'Thought', and takes 4.063-4 to be defending the doctrine that 'having a sense' was one and the same thing with 'being true-or-false'. I am not sure that Frege would have disagreed with this somewhat gnomically-expressed claim, at least on some ways of taking it; equally I suspect that there are ways of taking it which would not be in conflict with the suggestion offered here
5. L. Goddard, 'Counting', Australasian Journal of Philosophy and Psychology, 1962
6. Bernard Harrison, 'Identity, Predication and Colour', American Philosophical Quarterly, v. 23, no. 1, April 1986, 105-114
7. and in Andrew Harrison, ed., Philosophy and the Visual Arts, Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co. (1987), 169-189
8. also 'Wittgenstein and Scepticism', in Klaus Puhl, ed., Meaning Scepticism, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter (1991), pp. 34-69
9. John Wilkins, An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, London (1668)
10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, tr. Peter Winch, Oxford: Blackwell (1980), 84e
11. Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a Memoir, tr. L. Furtmüller, ed. B. F. McGuinness, Oxford: Blackwell (1967), 83
12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, tr Claude Lefort and John O'Neill, London: Heinemann (1974)
13. Cf. Donald Davidson, 'What Metaphors Mean', Critical Inquiry, 5, (1978), 31-47
14. For a more extended attempt at developing that sort of account of literary language, see my Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory, New Haven and London: Yale University Press (1991)