Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- 1 Wittgenstein's critique of philosophy
- 2 Pictures, logic, and the limits of sense in Wittgenstein's Tractatus
- 3 Fitting versus tracking
- 4 Philosophy as grammar
- 5 A philosophy of mathematics between two camps
- 6 Necessity and normativity
- 7 Wittgenstein, mathematics, and ethics
- 8 Notes and afterthoughts on the opening of Wittgenstein's Investigations
- 9 Mind, meaning, and practice
- 10 “Whose house is that?” Wittgenstein on the self
- 11 The question of linguistic idealism revisited
- 12 Forms of life
- 13 Certainties of a world-picture
- 14 The availability of Wittgenstein's philosophy
- Bibliography
- Index
11 - The question of linguistic idealism revisited
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- 1 Wittgenstein's critique of philosophy
- 2 Pictures, logic, and the limits of sense in Wittgenstein's Tractatus
- 3 Fitting versus tracking
- 4 Philosophy as grammar
- 5 A philosophy of mathematics between two camps
- 6 Necessity and normativity
- 7 Wittgenstein, mathematics, and ethics
- 8 Notes and afterthoughts on the opening of Wittgenstein's Investigations
- 9 Mind, meaning, and practice
- 10 “Whose house is that?” Wittgenstein on the self
- 11 The question of linguistic idealism revisited
- 12 Forms of life
- 13 Certainties of a world-picture
- 14 The availability of Wittgenstein's philosophy
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The notion of “family resemblance” concepts seems to have particularly impressed itself on Wittgenstein in connection with historical and cultural categories. In describing, say, religions or ideologies, we find we cannot delineate them by giving clear, necessary, and sufficient conditions. The same applies to schools of thought such as “materialism” or “idealism” or “naturalism.” These labels are family resemblance concepts: we use them to refer to something that is many-faceted and historically evolving. When we try to locate Wittgenstein within existing philosophical traditions we need to remember this exercise, too, will involve our using just such a variety of crisscrossing similarities, some general and some specific (PI, 66). We must not assume a similarity in one respect will be accompanied by similarities in others, or that any inconsistency or defect in the comparison is necessarily indicated by this. The value of these comparisons is to be assessed pragmatically, by their power to illuminate the structural features of his difficult arguments.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein , pp. 354 - 382Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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