ABSTRACT
Moore’s paradox, namely, the tangle associated with the phrase “I believe it is raining and it’s not raining”, got Wittgenstein philosophically excited, and he treated it both in detail and at large over many years. A central theme of general interpretative debate has been whether Wittgenstein’s treatment of paradox, as indicative of his philosophical method, aimed to establish some kinds of limits of language use or not. In this chapter, I revisit some presumptive candidates for such limits and respond negatively to the question. Rather than presenting more or less complete philosophical analyses of psychological concepts or invoking “limits” of language (here related to grammatical features of belief ascription and expression and our relation to our own words in contrast to those of others), Wittgenstein’s remarks in relation to Moore’s paradox work as reminders of specific features of language use that philosophers are prone to overlook. Wittgenstein provides a methodological antidote to the assumption that the issue at stake is some kind of logical obstacle to asserting the Moorean sentence: it is only when treated void of context of use that such sentences display the Moorean paradoxical feature. When presented in circumstances in which they can do work, Moorean sentences lose their paradoxicality and we are left with mere pieces of surface grammar.
