110 research outputs found
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On some standard objections to mathematical conventionalism
According to Wittgenstein, mathematical propositions are rules of grammar, that is, conventions, or implications of conventions. So his position can be regarded as a form of conventionalism. However, mathematical conventionalism is widely thought to be untenable due to objections presented by Quine, Dummett and Crispin Wright. It has also been argued that only an implausibly radical form of conventionalism could withstand the critical implications of Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations. In this article I discuss those objections to conventionalism and argue that none of them is convincing
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Wittgenstein on aesthetics and philosophy
Wittgenstein offers three objections to the idea of aesthetics as a branch of psychology: (i) Statistical data about people’s preferences have no normative force. (ii) Artistic value is not instrumental value, a capacity to produce independently identifiable – and scientifically measurable – psychological effects. (iii) While psychological investigations may bring to light the causes of aesthetic preferences, they fail to provide reasons for them. According to Wittgenstein, aesthetic explanations (unlike scientific explanations) are poignant synoptic representations of aspects of a work, and the criterion of success of an aesthetic explanation is that it satisfies the addressee. He repeatedly remarked that they resemble philosophical explanations, which also try to dispel puzzlement or confusion. The difference, however, is that whereas in philosophy we deal with general conceptual problems, aesthetic explanations typically concern individual responses to particular works of art
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The emergence of Wittgenstein’s views on aesthetics in the 1933 lectures
In this paper I offer a genetic account of how Wittgenstein developed his ideas on aesthetics in his 1933 lectures. He argued that the word ‘beautiful’ is neither the name of a particular perceptible quality, nor the name of whatever produces a certain psychological effect, and unlike ‘good’, it does not stand for a family-resemblance concept either. Rather, the word ‘beautiful’ has different meanings in different contexts as we apply it according to different criteria. However, in more advanced regions of aesthetics the word ‘beautiful’ ceases to play an important role. Instead, we judge things to be more or less correct according to genre-specific standards or criteria, which in an aesthetic discussion are presupposed, rather than argued for. Finally, Wittgenstein came to realise that providing support for an aesthetic appraisal according to some given criteria is not the only and perhaps not even the main focus of aesthetic discussion. More interesting to him became the idea of a puzzle or perplexity in aesthetics, which he discussed in greater detail in his 1938 lectures
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