antecedent or precursor to one (Z: 314). Our inclination to investigate further than is necessary (and recommendable) might be prompted by our demand for a certain kind of explanation rather than a careful description; it might be due to the way we conceive of a problem, to the tacit assumptions guiding our
, Machina (1976: 60–61) admits, »I am myself unable to see how one might arrive at [an assignment of precise degrees, I.B.] with any confidence.« He suggests, however, that an assignment would not need to be arbitrary, since empirical investigation could in principle reveal patterns in ordinary speakers
Unterfangen? Severin Schroeder bejaht diese Frage: [The Philosophical Investigation ’s] thrust is entirely negative, aimed at nothing more and nothing less than a demonstration that philosophical doctrine is invariably the result of linguistic confusion (PI §119), which needs to be cleared up and removed
nämlich beispielsweise die folgende Behauptung: »In the case studies that I investigate in [chapter 8], we will consistently find an absence of all of F1-F3«. 51 Und um zu einer solchen Behauptung berechtigt zu sein, müsste Cappelen natürlich auch eine Berufung auf F3 (und auf die anderen Merkmale
: Another plausible assumption is that when we apply the same word to a range of different things, there must be something that they, and only they, have in common, in virtue of which that word is applicable. This idea, according to Wittgenstein, ‘has shackled philosophical investigation’, leading
reflection and theory construction, often bound up with and reinforced by a network of metaphors or similes. A paradigm of a philosophical picture in this sense is the Augustinian conception of language as sketched by Wittgenstein in the opening paragraphs of his Philosophical Investigations . The
water. To investigate the paradigmatic exemplars’ nature and thus to determine the important physical properties of the kind, in turn, is the job of natural scientists, not of lexicographers (or, for that matter, analytic philosophers). Indeed, Waismann’s remarks about the use of the expression ›cat
. Second, speakers would be blind to the very fact that a very large portion of their everyday language is context-sensitive beyond the more familiar forms of context-sensitivity already well-investigated—they would suffer from second-order blindness , or, to quote Schiffer (1996: 329), be »bamboozled by