Relativism and the abolition of the other

Abstract

In this paper I consider the ‘disappearing we’ account of Wittgenstein's attitude to other ways of thought or other ‘conceptual schemes’. I argue that there is no evidence that Wittgenstein expected the ‘we’ to disappear, in the manner of Davidson, and that his affinities with relativistic trains of thought in fact go much deeper

Keywords:

• Wittgenstein
• relativism
• Davidson
• experience
• conceptual schemes

Notes

B. Stroud, ‘The Allure of Idealism’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 53 (1984), pp. 243–58.

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A371–2. See also A378.

J. Lear, ‘The Disappearing We’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 53 (1984), pp. 219–42.

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), p. 230.

Ibid., p. 223.

Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 261–73.

John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 8.

I am not here entering on the disputed issue of ‘non‐conceptual content’. Granted what we now know about the ubiquity and complexity of sub‐doxastic perceptual processing I find it very hard to know what hinges on this idea. It would only matter whether the first things to come into consciousness are fully conceptualized beliefs or unconceptualized sensations or qualia, things that might in principle be unrecognized and undescribed, if we knew what borderline consciousness marks. Since we don't, the issue seems to me to go rather quiet.

I go into further detail on this matter in ‘Julius Caesar and George Berkeley Play Leapfrog’, in Reading McDowell, ed. Cindy and Graham MacDonald, forthcoming.

Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 73.

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), Introduction, p. xxiii.