ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a tantalizingly slippery, highly controversial and very influential side of Wittgenstein's later teaching: his conventionalistic, anthropologistic theory of such basic logico-mathematical procedures as definitory sense- or concept-fixing. The foundations of logic and mathematics, if they can be said to have foundations, lie in the nature of men as physical, psychological and social creatures, and in the constraints of their environing world. This anthropologism of Wittgenstein's later teaching involves strong criticisms of the notion of a rule. The God's-eye view, with its non-successive grasp of an infinite totality, is arguably a necessary regulative idea for mathematics, logic, semantics and the theory of knowledge. Wittgenstein goes on to consider the implications of the fact that the theorems of logic and mathematics can be said to be established by many, even by infinitely many proofs. Mathematics is in fact a network of norms, of regulative, calculative procedures which are to be obeyed or followed.
