Abstract

This thesis offers an interpretation of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and its connection with the Tractatus. I argue that sameness ontologically as well as epistemologically depends on the existence of standards. I defend an interpretation of Wittgensteinian criteria as such standards. I criticize the interpretation of criteria as noninductive evidence, and the idea that the difference between the Tractatus and the Investigations is that between realist and anti-realist semantical theories. I argue instead for continuity between Davidson and the later Wittgenstein. ;I then argue that a concern with intentionality is at the center of Wittgenstein's early philosophy by showing how an underlying conception of intentionality, and the conditions it imposes on representation, motivate the principle features of the Tractatus. From this perspective continuities with Kant's first Critique are developed. I then argue that one main concern of the Investigations is to criticize the tractarian conception of intentionality. Wittgenstein's discussion of rule-following uses the criterial dependence of sameness to attack his earlier thesis that representation requires an identity of form between the object and the content of an intentional act. This leads him to conclude that the central problem of the Tractatus does not admit of coherent formulation. ;Three final chapters draw out some implications of this interpretation. Chapter 6, on Kripke's Interpretation of Wittgenstein, dissolves the skeptical problem Kripke attributes to him. Chapter 7 replaces Malcolm's reading of the private language argument with a decisively different one. Chapter 8 defends the role of expressive behavior as criterial for the capacity for feeling; attacks the idea of the incorrigibility of the mental; and answers Wittgenstein's question about what is left over from arm-raising less the rising arm by way of explaining a distinction between basic and nonbasic action-descriptions in the context of a Davidsonian philosophy of action