Preproceedings 2006 - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

given physical world and our representations of it or our
talk about it – or at least it is a difficult line to draw. That
the ideas of a tree and a base in the game of tag have the
same epistemic footing (to use Quine’s terminology) is a
proposition that we may see coming out of Wittgenstein.
And we can most certainly see that there is no discernable
gap between our language-games and the reality with
which they correspond if we perceive that the empirical
world is precisely that which is recognized by our
language-games by their involvement in the games; and
“here we see that the idea of ‘agreement with reality’ does
not have any clear application” (OC, #215) if it is not an
agreement with semantics.
This paper has pursued the notion that the
heavyweight language-based response to skepticism is to
be found in Wittgenstein and corroborated by Quine. It has
been shown that should one resort to an understanding of
language as language-games then there is no room for
“strong” skepticism beyond the room allotted for any other
language-game. There may perhaps be even less as we
noted above that the practice of such a game would
amount to expostulations further and further removed from
ways of life and meaning. At the least it has been shown
that it would take a total revision in terms of how meaning
is constructed in order for skepticism to overpower this
language-based response and that, once we recognize
this, there is no need to resort to skepticism or at least it is
even less necessary to consider skepticism than it was
when we suggested before that the best response was to
ignore skeptical concerns.
116
Grounded Action: Wittgenstein against Skepticism - Edward Guetti
References
Landesman and Meeks (eds.) 2003 Philosophical Skepticism,
Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Sluga and Stern (eds.) 1996 Cambridge Companion to Ludwig
Wittgenstein Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Univeristy Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1972 On Certainty, Denis Paul and G.E.M.
Anscombe, trans, G.E.M. Anscombe and von Wright, eds., New
York, NY: Harper Torchbook.