Sophia, Vol. 44, No. 2, October 2005. Copyright �9 2005 Ashgate Publishing Limited.

THE THIRD WITTGENSTEIN

DANII~LE MOYAL-SHARROCK, ED., The Third Wittgenstein: The Post-Investigations Works London: Ashgate, 2004

Review by Graeme Marshall University of Melbourne g.marshall@arts, unimelb.edu.au

The idea of a later late Wittgenstein has been around ever since On Certainty first appeared. Soon there was both the sense that Part II of the Philosophical Investigations could now be sensibly relocated on the new ground Wittgenstein seemed to be traversing and that here was a different enough perspective on some of the main lines of thought in Wittgenstein's heretofore late writing to warrant the appreciation of a distinct and significant shift. Everyone will agree that there are similarities and continuities in his thought even if some of us may emphasise the differences.

There seems to be general agreement about what 'the third Wittgenstein' encompasses. Apart from those mentioned above, there are his other writings from around 1946 including Remarks on Colour, Last Writings in the Philosophy of Psychology and Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology; but the central work remains On Certainty. Before this collection of papers, however, there has been no forum attempt I know of to determine the main content of what is new. The editor, Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, is to be applauded for having done this here. She writes that it was not her purpose to bring together philosophers who were all agreeable to the idea of a third Wittgenstein but rather to encourage discussion of both the idea and the work of a third Wittgenstein.

Her Introduction is exemplary and from it alone one can see three of Wittgenstein's main concerns emerging. They are closely related. First, it is claimed that in On Certainty Wittgenstein is increasingly foundationalistic. This may be surprising in view of his clear and profound statement there: 'It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.' (p. 471) The beginning is the whole system working. However, Stroll claims to have discerned more than seventy uses of foundational language in On Certainty though he does regard Wittgenstein's foundationalism as being of an unusual nonpropositional kind. And he makes much of the point that it is spoken about in strikingly metaphorical language which is both irreplaceable and the only way we can alter our picture of the world. Here Wittgenstein shows, Stroll thinks, a firmer

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and larger understanding of the limitless scope of everyday speech. Hutto demurs over the claim that foundationalism makes its first

appearance in On Certainty and contends that both the early and late Wittgenstein held that at the bottom of our ordinary practices is a foundation that admits of no justification or intelligible description. This may remove our surprise but not, I think, our unease. Wittgenstein's emphasis on the language game being played, that in the beginning was the deed, that what we come to rest on and with is action and living a distinctive life, this emphasis hardly makes 'foundationalism' any the less misleading. There are too many entrenched associations to the old traditions to make the term anything but unhelpful.

This connects with the second concern. What holds firm for us is not what we know but what we are certain of, and certainty, for all its practical necessity, is not epistemologically significant: it does not admit of scepticism and requires no defence against it. In Koethe's view Wittgenstein maintains that the special role played in our practices of what have come to be called 'hinge propositions' neither confers on them, nor requires them to have, a privileged epistemic status. They may, inter alia, express our certainties and from time to time our worries but not our cognitive doubts.

Behind and reinforcing both of these views is the third concern: Wittgenstein extends his concept of grammar to include contingent facts. Moyal-Sharrock pertinently calls this 'the grammaticalization of experience'. Experience enables us to recognize the rules we have been and are following which does not make the rules themselves merely empirical. What begin as representations become paradigmatic modes of representation. Moore's truisms for example, are not falsifiable empirical propositions but grammatical remarks. But there are as well strings of words identical to those in the truisms whose use is not grammatical but empirical and ordinarily falsifiable. Moyal- Sharrock argues that it is a category mistake which philosophical scepticism commits to confuse the two different uses of the words in question. The context of use shows which kind of use it is.

There is an apparently opposing view that the 'hinge propositions' are empirical though the possibility of their being false is restricted by the fact that our whole system of beliefs depends on them. Glock thinks this resonates with Moore's antisceptical manoeuvre of seeing it as more rational to reject the premises of sceptical arguments against them than the truisms themselves. So it does; but the deep difference of use to which Wittgenstein alerts us makes the opposition vanish. 'What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.' (On Certainty, p. 144). And how it is held fast depends on what lies around it. Luther's 'Here I stand; I can do no other' is not 'The only thing to do with

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power is to have it' nor is it Othello's 'She loved me for the dangers I had passed and I loved her that she did pity them.' This may be a form of social naturalism as Medina suggests but it is nothing like the reductionist scientific natm'alism of, for example, Quine.

What this comes to is that we take Moore's truisms and their like as not falsifiable in the normal ways until they no longer hold fast for us. Taking them like this enables us to use sensory evidence and other proof procedures sensibly about other truth claims without being distracted by mad philosophical doubts, hence their role as 'hinge' propositions. And hence, too, the connections with 'perceiving as' and the limits of interpretation that Wittgenstein was wrestling with in Philosophical Investigations Part II. 'Perceiving as' is not interpretation but it is not just sensing either. It is something like being at home in the world we share with others who have a language.

There are many more riches in this collection, and of course in the third Wittgenstein's thought, not least Goldstein's discussion of the analogy between experiencing meaning and meaning blindness, on the one hand, and aspect perception and aspect blindness on the other, for example, and Bouveresse on Wittgenstein's 'logic of colours'. But this brief review should be enough to whet, pro or con, anyone's appetite.