Abstract

This thesis explores the relationship of measurement and skepticism in Wittgenstein's later philosophy. My treatment of Wittgenstein assumes that, in making the transition from the Tractatus to Philosophical Investigations, he remains concerned with delineating the limits of philosophy--not as a demarcation of what is unsayable--but as a quest for what is teachable. The dissolution of the picture theory of language is marked by a new mode of analysis, the grammatical investigation, which elicits the rules and criteria whereby language-games may be played, extended, and transformed. The philosophical vantage point from which this mode derives is skeptical and multi-perspectival. ;Wittgenstein argues that linguistic rules are highly localized--i.e., the rules of one language-game are not necessarily invariant under translation to another language-game. Wittgenstein himself claims that his approach bears similarities to Einstein's relativistic considerations; however, whereas the physicist's model is justified by the object of study, the philosopher's discussion is justified and shaped by the methodology it employs. As a whole, Philosophical Investigations and Wittgenstein's other later writings provide a schematic via a set of comparisons, similes, etc. which is comprehensive, not in its generality, but in its diversity. The result is a methodology which, once turned on itself, takes on the form of the structure it analyzes. ;My examination indicates how Wittgenstein's later writings can be viewed as a morphology of language based on Goethe's morphology of plants. Language-games, for Wittgenstein, are the Urbilder of Philosophical Investigations. My thesis also discusses Wittgenstein's morphological study of Seeing-As and the relevance of skepticism to that study. In addition, I illustrate how Wittgenstein's morphological approach can be utilized in the philosophy of science. Finally, I claim that Wittgenstein's analysis of the fluctuating status of empirical propositions in On Certainty proceeds from the relativistic considerations and the morphological approach outlined above