ABSTRACT
I suggested in the preceding chapter that Wittgenstein successively employed three different strategies for attempting to clarify the relation between phenomenal and physical space. The first was to develop a phenomenological language, suited to the description of immediate experience and to be distinguished sharply from the “physical” language in which we speak of objects in public space (§2.4). Such a language would dispose of everything hypothetical, and it would-in some way difficult to elucidate-provide a “grammar of the description of those facts on which physics builds its theories” (PR §1/Ms 105 5). This quest for a primary language gave way to Wittgenstein’s adoption of the Cambridge vocabulary of sense-data, which, he seemed to think, satisfied the need for a description that omitted everything hypothetical, without falling into the difficulties confronting a phenomenological language (§2.5). Part of this second strategy was to sharply distinguish hypotheses from propositions, where the latter were to be understood as statements about one’s own sense-data. However, the adoption of the sense-datum vocabulary was to be thought of as one possible form of description, which could be replaced by a hypothetical description (§§2.3, 2.5). Wittgenstein, I argued, was never committed to a substantive sense-datum theory (§§2.1-2.3).
