On being "Other-minded": Wittgenstein, Davidson, and logical aliens

International Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 43, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 463-473

  Medina, José ^a  

^a VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949247936     PISSN: 00190365     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/ipq200343437     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. See James Conant, "The Search for Logically Alien Thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege, and the Tractatus," Philosophical Topics 20 (1991) 115-80
2. Jonathan Lear, "Leaving the World Alone," The Journal of Philosophy (1982) 382-403
3. "The Disappearing 'We,'" Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 58 (1984) 219-42
4. and "Transcendental Anthropology" in Subject, Context and Thought, ed. J. McDowell and P. Pettit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 267-98
5. Jonathan Lear, Open Minded (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)
6. An analysis of this thought-experiment can be found in Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 86-125
7. More recent interpretations include: David Cerbone, "How to Do Things with Wood: Wittgenstein, Frege, and the Problem of Illogical Thought" in The New Wittgenstein, ed. A. Crary and R. Read (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 293-314
8. José Medina, The Unity of Wittgenstein's Philosophy: Necessity, Intelligibility, and Normativity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 142-56
9. and Mark W. Risjord, Woodcutters and Witchcraft: Rationality and Interpretive Change in the Social Sciences (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). Some commentators, such as Risjord, refer to this thought-experiment as "the wood cutters."
10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics. Cambridge, 1939 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 202 (hereafter abbreviated as W, plus the page number)
11. cf. also his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978), I.150 (hereafter abbreviated as R, plus volume and page number)
12. Charles Taylor, "Theories of Meaning" in his Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 248-92
13. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1989); see esp. pp. 306-07 and 374-75
14. See George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)
15. See, for instance, Michael Lynch, Truth in Context (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998)
16. In Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 183-98
17. Eleanor Irwin, Colour Terms in Early Greek Poetry (Toronto: Hakkert, 1974)
18. Russell Dancy, "Alien Concepts," Synthese 56 (1983) 283-300
19. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 66