Time: January 16, 2025 at 4:00 PM
Venue: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Common Room, Fabianinkatu 24 A (3rd floor)
Abstract
According to John McDowell, there is a significant ‘strand’ in Wittgenstein’s so-called ‘private language argument’ (roughly, Philosophical Investigations §§243-315) that is an integrated element in a quite general exorcism of the dualism of scheme and Given. Specifically, McDowell claims that these passages are intended to reveal the wrong-headedness of the said dualism’s picture of inner experience: a picture in which a stream of consciousness is made up of non-conceptual items that justify conceptualizations of them.
While this reinterpretation of the private language argument has gained a significant amount of attention in the literature, it has not been the subject of a wholesale, detailed critique. This paper fills that gap. In it I argue that McDowell does not pick out even a ‘strand’ in Wittgenstein’s thinking. While it is plausible to think that Wittgenstein rejects something describable as ‘the myth of the Given’ in his polemic against the possibility of a private language, what he rejects, and the reasons he has for rejecting it, are far removed from McDowell’s reconstruction of his thinking. The paper ends with an account of what the target of Wittgenstein’s anti-private language polemic really is and how it actually proceeds.
Bio
Julian Dodd is a professor of philosophy and Head of the School of Philosophy, Religion and Science at the University of Leeds, UK. He has written three monographs – An Identity Theory of Truth (Palgrave, 2000), Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology (OUP, 2007), and Being True to Works of Music (OUP, 2020) – as well as about 50 journal articles in aesthetics, the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophical logic. He has a long-standing, though somewhat cavalier, interest in Wittgenstein’s philosophy and is focussing on this aspect of his research for the time being. His article ‘“Rails invisibly laid to infinity”’ was published in The Philosophical Quarterly in 2022.