ABSTRACT
Wittgenstein presented a very restricted view of the objectives of philosophy and indeed the achievements open to philosophers. Philosophy is a purely descriptive activity, and what it describes is the obvious, what everyone knows; it should not generalize, explain, or even advance theses, and although criticism and reform are possible, they are no part of the philosopher’s task. Philosophy is a therapeutic enterprise. Its aim is to help others to escape from the sort of confusions and muddles that result from inattention to language and its place in human affairs. To these ends it might clarify the use of concepts such as “authority,” “obligation,” and “rights” but it would do so not to teach us something we do not know about these concepts – because we already know everything there is to know about them – but to clear up difficulties that we have gotten into by reminding us of things we know but to which we are not paying sufficient attention.1 In one respect our discussion of Wittgenstein is been an argument that his own philosophical practice does not conform to his preachments about what philosophy should do. The arguments we have been examining constitute a highly general account or analysis of language and meaning. Of course this account insists upon the great diversity of language games and makes no attempt to reduce that diversity or to explain it in terms of some single or very small number of quintessential factors. But the argument that language is diverse and irreducible is itself a kind of generalization, and the account contains numerous other contentions of equal generality. For immediate purposes the two most important of these contentions are the discussions of “right,” “true,” and “know” in connection with the critique of the possibility of a private language and the closely connected arguments about rules, language games, and the relationships between the latter and what people do. To begin with the first discussion, recall Wittgenstein’s argument that public language eliminates the difficulty with “E,” the difficulty that a person using “E” would have nothing independent of his memory against which to test his use and hence could not know that he was actually using it in the correct manner. Unlike private language, in short, public language allows of such notions as a correct and incorrect, sensible and nonsensical use of concepts and in many cases allows certainty as to whether a concept has been used correctly or nonsensically.
