Non-Linguistic Sources of Philosophical Problems

In the last lecture, I discussed three ways in which we are prone to be misled by the surface grammars of our languages:

• 1. Similarities of grammatical form mask differences in usage.

• 2. Analogies between fragments of different language games conceal logical differences.

• 3. Misleading pictures embedded in our language lead us astray.

Before turning to non-linguistic sources of conceptual confusion, I would like to draw your attention to a further important point.

Contrary to the idea that all languages have the same underlying depth grammar, Wittgenstein now denied the very idea of a hidden depth grammar and acknowledged differences in the logico-grammatical features of expressions in different languages. Grammatical forms need not be linguistic universals. Philosophical problems that are prominent in one language may not even arise in other languages. We deal with the philosophical problems that arise in our culture, in our language and in our times. These may be very similar to the problems that confronted Plato and Aristotle, but they may not be. Philosophers of Greek antiquity, as Wittgenstein pointed out, were just as puzzled about the nature of existence, or of truth, or of the good as we are – after all, they had verbs corresponding to ‘to exist’ and ‘to be’ and adjectives corresponding to ‘true’ and ‘good’. But unlike the medievals, they were not concerned with proofs of the existence of the God of monotheism, nor worried about how the God of Christianity can be three persons but one substance. And unlike us, they were not concerned with whether machines can think or how we can understand sentences we have never heard before. Philosophy, one might say, is concerned with treating diseases of the intellect, and the viruses that affect people at one place and time may differ from those that affect other people at other places and times. This change in perspective is obviously a corollary of abandoning the philosophical quest for knowledge of the putative language-independent essence of all things or the ultimate perfectly general nature of the universe and the transformation of philosophy into the clarification of our forms of representation or conceptual schemes and the dissolution of conceptual puzzlement.