I want to clarify a bit my position.
There are not so many points on which I would agree with
Wittgenstein. This is mostly because I find the
consequences of his view unacceptable. Nevertheless, even
if my intention is not to defend him, I don't think that
one can ignore what he says or dismiss his assertions with
a wave of hand, on the assumption that Wittgenstein won't
make a rational interlocutor. There have been many attempts
to reconstruct Wittgenstein's arguments for one or another
of his assertions (Kripke's paper on the private language
argument is a good example). Some scholars have tried to
rationally reconstruct his entire view, and not entirely
without success. My text is partly some schemata for such
a rational reconstruction. I do not pretend, with the
points (1)-(4), that I preserve Wittgenstein's position
entirely. In fact, I don't care too much about that. The
reconstruction has to rely on Wittgenstein's philosophy,
not to mirror it. The only condition it has to satisfy is
this: to be formulated such that its potential refutation,
once expressed, would entail the rebuttal of Wittgenstein's
position itself. My basic claim is that by conceptual
analysis and logical clarification it is possible to
articulate such a reconstruction. An extended claim is that
the reconstruction should follow the sketch presented in
(1)-(4), by including, for every point from (1) to (4), a
set of arguments, and the required disentanglements.
I do not wish to argue for or against any of the
(1)-(4) thesis, in what follows, but only to show that they
can hold together and stand for a general argument, with
the unacceptable conclusion that we must give up doing
philosophy (in particular, that we must abandon any
systematical project of logical analysis of the natural
language).
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