I think I’m getting you now—you’re a radical advocate of ask/tell culture, right? I’m not—in my world you don’t tell other people to remove part of their posts. But anyway, let’s leave this and go to the content of your post, which is interesting.
Yes, Kripkenstein is controversial, which I referred to when writing that it’s not clear it’s the right interpretation.
Yes, I do think there are strong relativist strands in Wittgenstein. Again, it is hard to know what Wittgenstein actually meant, since he’s so unclear, but a famous Wittgensteinian such as Peter Winch certainly drew relativistic conclusions from Wittgenstein’s writings, something I delve upon here.):
Winch argues that cultures cannot be judged from the outside, by independent standards. Thus, the Zande’s belief in witches, while unjustified in our culture, is justified in their culture, and since there is no culture-transcending standard, we have no right to tell them what to believe. Gellner takes this to be a reductio ad absurdum of Wittgenstein’s position: since the Zande are obviously mistaken, any philosophy that says they are not must be false. And, since Gellner thinks that Winch has interpreted Wittgenstein correctly, this makes not only Winch’s but also Wittgenstein’s philosophy false.
(Actually, it strikes me now that Gellner’s strategies wrt the two Wittgenstein interpretations are quite similar. In both cases he congratulates Winch/Kripke for having elucidated Wittgenstein’s muddled ideas, by and large accepts their interpretation, and then argues that given this interpretation, Wittgenstein is obviously wrong.)
Regarding Wittgenstein and “mainstream philosophy”. While Wittgenstein still is a star in some circles, most analytic philosophers reject his views today, rightly or wrongly. The linguistic approach to philosophy due to Wittgenstein and the Oxfordian ordinary language school died out in the 60′s, and was replaced by a different kind of philosophy, which didn’t think that philosophical problems were pseudo-problems that arose because we failed to understand how our language works. Instead they went back to the pre-Wittgensteinian view that they were real problems that should be attacked head on, rather than getting dissolved by the analysis of language.
This points to something more general, namely that analytic philosophy is far from monolithic. It includes Wittgensteinians, Quinean naturalists and “neo-scholastics” (in James Ladyman and Don Ross’s apt phrase) and no doubt a score of other branches (it depends on how you individuate branches, obviously). I take it that most of LW’s criticism of analytic philosophy is actually direct against “neo-scholasticism”, which is accused of not being adequately informed by the sciences, of working with outdated methods, of being generally concerned with ephemeral problems, etc. In my view there is much to this criticism, but similar criticisms have been launched by naturalistic or postivistic philosophers within the analytic camp.
The huge differences between the different branches of analytic philosophy makes the term “analytic philosophy” a bit misleading, in fact.
I should have explicated more clearly what I meant by “some sort of Wittgensteinian logic” in the OP, though—point taken.
I think I’m getting you now—you’re a radical advocate of ask/tell culture, right? I’m not—in my world you don’t tell other people to remove part of their posts. But anyway, let’s leave this and go to the content of your post, which is interesting.
Yes, Kripkenstein is controversial, which I referred to when writing that it’s not clear it’s the right interpretation.
Yes, I do think there are strong relativist strands in Wittgenstein. Again, it is hard to know what Wittgenstein actually meant, since he’s so unclear, but a famous Wittgensteinian such as Peter Winch certainly drew relativistic conclusions from Wittgenstein’s writings, something I delve upon here.):
(Actually, it strikes me now that Gellner’s strategies wrt the two Wittgenstein interpretations are quite similar. In both cases he congratulates Winch/Kripke for having elucidated Wittgenstein’s muddled ideas, by and large accepts their interpretation, and then argues that given this interpretation, Wittgenstein is obviously wrong.)
Regarding Wittgenstein and “mainstream philosophy”. While Wittgenstein still is a star in some circles, most analytic philosophers reject his views today, rightly or wrongly. The linguistic approach to philosophy due to Wittgenstein and the Oxfordian ordinary language school died out in the 60′s, and was replaced by a different kind of philosophy, which didn’t think that philosophical problems were pseudo-problems that arose because we failed to understand how our language works. Instead they went back to the pre-Wittgensteinian view that they were real problems that should be attacked head on, rather than getting dissolved by the analysis of language.
This points to something more general, namely that analytic philosophy is far from monolithic. It includes Wittgensteinians, Quinean naturalists and “neo-scholastics” (in James Ladyman and Don Ross’s apt phrase) and no doubt a score of other branches (it depends on how you individuate branches, obviously). I take it that most of LW’s criticism of analytic philosophy is actually direct against “neo-scholasticism”, which is accused of not being adequately informed by the sciences, of working with outdated methods, of being generally concerned with ephemeral problems, etc. In my view there is much to this criticism, but similar criticisms have been launched by naturalistic or postivistic philosophers within the analytic camp.
The huge differences between the different branches of analytic philosophy makes the term “analytic philosophy” a bit misleading, in fact.
I should have explicated more clearly what I meant by “some sort of Wittgensteinian logic” in the OP, though—point taken.