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Neilsen on Wittgenstein

  • Writer: Orib3
    Orib3
  • Sep 3, 2020
  • 1 min read

Updated: Sep 5, 2020


I was reading an essay by Kai Neilsen on "Wittgensteinian Fideism"(https://www.kainielsen.org/uploads/1/1/9/0/119098149/1967_-_wittgensteinian_fideism.pdf) Before giving his critique of philosophers who unwarrantedly adhere to a particular version/ reading of Wittgenstein Neilsen gives a great run down of some of the major positions/ takeaways from Wittgenstein's work that philosophers typically use. I am reproducing Neilsens list here.


1) The forms of language are the forms of life

2)What is given are the forms of life

3) Ordinary language is all right as it is.

4) The different modes of discourse which are distinctive modes of life have a logic of their own.

5) A philosopher's task is not to evaluate or criticize language or the forms of life, but to describe them where necessary and to the extent necessary to break philosophical perplexity concerning their operation.

6) Forms of life taken as a whole are not amenable to criticism; each mode of discourse is in order as it is, for each has its own criteria and each sets its own norms of rationality, intelligibility and reality.

7) These general dispute engendering concepts i.e. rationality, intelligibility and reality are systematically (and I would add doggedly) ambiguous; their exact meaning can only be discovered in the context of a determinate way of life.

8) There is no Archimedean point in terms of which a philosopher (or for that matter anyone) can relevantly criticize whole modes of discourse or, what comes to the same thing, ways of life, for each mode of discourse has its own specific criteria of rationality/ irrationality, intelligibility/ unintelligibility and reality/ unreality.


All of this is usually summed up in the pithy phrase: To imagine a language is to imagine a way of life.

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