Why should I be reasonable ?' asks for a reason. Brandom might stress that we just are inferential animals. That's what 'rational' means. — Pie

Indeed. :up: Pinker defines reason as the use of logic to attain a goal. Which, if you accept this, supports Nazism as nicely as it does Liberalism. My concern is not the privileging reason per say but the fact that reason can underpin mutually exclusive belief systems. You still tend to begin with suppositions which are values based and not rationally derived.

Rorty didn't trust theories of human nature, but I'm not afraid to keep trying to make explicit what we are, wary of course of abuses of the phrases 'human nature' and 'rationality. — Pie

Would it be fair to say you are a romantic of a kind? I probably side with Rorty here but largely because I eschew system building and he (though dead) remains smarter than I am, so there's that...

I enjoy your use of the English language.

This talk of norms, is it an advance on Plato, or is it sophistry in modern, perhaps even scientific garb? — Srap Tasmaner

One ought not discuss norms ? Or one ought not bother with glib incoherence, from an officer of the local thought police ?

Pinker defines reason as the use of logic to attain a goal. Which, if you accept this, supports Nazism as nicely as it does Liberalism. — Tom Storm

We might say that Hitler applied something like instrumental reason. Sure.

My concern is not the privileging reason per say but the fact that reason can underpin mutually exclusive belief systems. — Tom Storm

If understood in a 'thin' way, then I agree that the same reason/logic applied to different premises should lead to different conclusions.

I probably side with Rorty here but largely because I eschew system building and he (though dead) remains smarter than I am, so there's that... — Tom Storm

Rorty is deep. Some of his comments on the depths of the soul are probably often overlooked. I'm excited about the work of one of his academic sons. He advised Robert Brandom, who does take the risk of a theory making explicit of human nature, updating Hegel.

Would it be fair to say you are a romantic of a kind? — Tom Storm

Tricky question ! Hegel is called a Romantic Rationalist, and the gist and feel of his project appeals to me, though I feel no attachment to or mastery of many of the details, having come at it initially through the mad atheistic Kojève. The story of a process becoming aware of itself, making its own nature progressively explicit as a telling of stories, is just beautiful. It's echoed by an amoeba transforming itself into a Darwin who only then grasps what has happened.

Maybe I'm just an ironist, thought, who also loves Sartre's Nausea. I take Shakespeare as a hero, following Harold Bloom, thinking that maybe he's the hero of an expansion that never recaptures itself, doesn't know its own depths. Public decency and private irony, something like that. As Elvis or Rorty said, don't be cruel. But in the same book (CIS), Rorty was frank about the desire to humiliate. He understood the 'festival of cruelty,' just as the program Smith seemed to.

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.

My philosophical position was initially 'pomo' and relativistic, probably because I was an alienated, artistic young adult who wanted to start rather than follow trends. But, as my biased current self might put it, I grew up, saw the logical incoherence in the presentation, developed what I now see as a better spiel (product, costume), without however (I hope) losing some perversely mystical gallows humor that takes it all as a game or a joke.

Not so much. The notion of meaning can be dropped. We use the words to make true statements. — Banno

I think that's fair. I was criticized for waxing Heidegger earlier (gently), but one might mention the 'significance' of a familiar and articulated world. Language and world and we ourselves are equiprimordial, even if we can talk about the time of the dinosaurs or the big bang.

Just so you can see what Rorty's systematic 'son' is up to,...

One might ask whether the inferentialist approach does not require overestimating the extent to which we are rational. Are we really very good at telling what is a reason for what? How often do we act for reasons—and in particular, for good reasons? The question betrays a misunderstanding. We are rational creatures in the sense that our claims and aims are always liable to assessment as to our reasons for them. How good we are at satisfying those demands doesn’t change our status as rational. And it must be kept in mind that on this way of thinking about the nature of semantic content, it makes no sense to think of us first having a bunch of sentences expressing definite propositions, which accordingly stand in inferential relations to one another, and only then having there be a question about how many of those inferences we get right. For it is our practices of treating what is expressed by some noises as reasons for what is expressed by other noises that makes those noises express conceptual contents in the first place. Once the enterprise is up and running, we can certainly make mistakes about what follows from the commitments we have undertaken, and what would justify them. But there is no possibility of us massively or globally getting the inferences wrong (for very much the same Quinean reasons that Davidson has emphasized).

I have been arguing that it is better to think in terms of understanding than knowledge, and better to think of meaning-and-understanding (which on this approach are two sides of one coin) in terms of inference than in terms of truth. So far, I have approached this issue largely from the point of view of semantics and the philosophy of language. But there is more at stake here. For this way of thinking about semantic content goes to the heart of the question of what it is to be sapient—to be the kind of creature we most fundamentally are. It says that we are beings that live, and move, and have our being in the space of reasons. We are, at base, creatures who give and ask for reasons—who are sensitive to that “force of the better reason”, persuasive rather than coercive, which so mystified and fascinated the ancient Greek philosophers. Crossing that all-important line from mere sentience to sapience is participating in practices of giving and asking for reasons: practices in which some performances have the pragmatic significance of claims or assertions, which accordingly, as both standing in need of reasons and capable of serving as reasons (that is, of playing the role both of conclusion and as premise in inference) count as expressing propositional semantic content.

This semantic rationalism—which goes with thinking of content in the first instance in terms of inference rather than reference, reason rather than truth—flies in the face of many famous movements in 20th century philosophical thought. The American pragmatists, above all, John Dewey, used the possibility of explaining knowing that in terms of knowing how not only to assimilate our sapient intellectual activity to the skillful doings of merely sapient animals, but at the same time to blur the sharp, bright line I am trying to draw between sapience and sentience. Wittgenstein famously said that language does not have a ‘downtown’: a core set of practices on which the rest depend, and around which they are arrayed, like suburbs. But inferentialism says that practices of giving and asking for reasons are the ‘downtown’ of language. For it is only by incorporating such practices that practices put in play propositional and other conceptual contents at all—and hence count as discursive practices, practices in which it is possible to say anything. The first ‘Sprachspiel’, language game, Wittgenstein introduces in the Philosophical Investigations has a builder issuing sorderss to an assistant. When he says ‘Slab!’ the assistant has been trained to respond by bringing a slab. When he says ‘Block!’ the assistant has been trained to respond by bringing a block. From the inferentialist point of view, this does not qualify as a Sprachspiel at all; it is a vocal, but not a verbal game. For the assistant is just a practical version of the parrot I considered earlier: he has been trained reliably to respond differentially to stimuli. But he grasps no concepts, and if this is the whole game, the builder expresses none. An order or command is not just any signal that is appropriately responded to in one way rather than another. It is something that determines what is an appropriate response by saying what one is to do, by describing it, specifying what concepts are to apply to a doing in order for it to count as obeying the order. Derrida’s crusade against what he calls the ‘logocentrism’ of the Western philosophical tradition has brilliantly and inventively emphasized all the other things one can do with language, besides arguing, inferring, explaining, theorizing, and asserting. Thus we get the playful essays in which the key to his reading of Hegel is that his name in French rhymes with ‘eagle’, his reading of Nietzsche that turns on what Derrida claims is the most important of his philosophical writings (a slip of paper that turned up in his belongings after his death, reading only “I have forgotten my umbrella,”), and the unforgettable meditation on the significance of the width of the margins of the page for the meaning of the text printed there. But if inferentialism is the right way to think about contentfulness, then the game of giving and asking for reasons is privileged among the games we play with words. For it is the one in virtue of which they mean anything at all—the one presupposed and built upon by all the other uses we can then put those meanings to, once they are available. Again, the master-idea of Foucault’s critique of modernity is that reason is just one more historically conditioned form of power, in principle no better (and in its pervasive institutionalization, in many ways worse) than any other form of oppression. But if giving and asking for reasons is the practice that institutes meanings in the first place, then it is does not belong in a box with violence and intimidation, which show up rather in the contrast class precisely insofar as they constrain what we do by something other than reasons.
— Brandom

I'm going to justify this detour in terms of the jesting Pilate.
@Tom Storm got me thinking about Rorty and irony and Romanticism, inspiring me to dust off a few quotes.

Can we imagine an ironist or jester, who plays at being earnestly systematic ? The passage below has always moved me. In it, Hegel credits the gang of literary Romantics with a high but not the highest level of spirituality or consciousness or transcendence. He swallows them.

Now if we stop at these absolutely empty forms which originate from the absoluteness of the abstract ego, nothing is treated in and for itself and as valuable in itself, but only as produced by the subjectivity of the ego. But in that case the ego can remain lord and master of everything, and in no sphere of morals, law, things human and divine, profane and sacred, is there anything that would not first have to be laid down by the ego, and that therefore could not equally well be destroyed by it. Consequently everything genuinely and independently real becomes only a show, not true and genuine on its own account or through itself, but a mere appearance due to the ego in whose power and caprice and at whose free disposal it remains. To admit or cancel it depends wholly on the pleasure of the ego, already absolute in itself simply as ego. Now thirdly, the ego is a living, active individual, and its life consists in making its individuality real in its own eyes and in those of others, in expressing itself, and bringing itself into appearance. For every man, by living, tries to realize himself and does realize himself.

Now in relation to beauty and art, this acquires the meaning of living as an artist and forming one’s life artistically. But on this principle, I live as an artist when all my action and my expression in general, in connection with any content whatever, remains for me a mere show and assumes a shape which is wholly in my power. In that case I am not really in earnest either with this content or, generally, with its expression and actualization. For genuine earnestness enters only by means of a substantial interest, something of intrinsic worth like truth, ethical life, etc., – by means of a content which counts as such for me as essential, so that I only become essential myself in my own eyes in so far as I have immersed myself in such a content and have brought myself into conformity with it in all my knowing and acting. When the ego that sets up and dissolves everything out of its own caprice is the artist, to whom no content of consciousness appears as absolute and independently real but only as a self-made and destructible show, such earnestness can find no place, since validity is ascribed only to the formalism of the ego.

True, in the eyes of others the appearance which I present to them may be regarded seriously, in that they take me to be really concerned with the matter in hand, but in that case they are simply deceived, poor limited creatures, without the faculty and ability to apprehend and reach the loftiness of my standpoint. Therefore this shows me that not everyone is so free (i.e. formally free)[52] as to see in everything which otherwise has value, dignity, and sanctity for mankind just a product of his own power of caprice, whereby he is at liberty either to grant validity to such things, to determine himself and fill his life by means of them, or the reverse. Moreover this virtuosity of an ironical artistic life apprehends itself as a divine creative genius for which anything and everything is only an unsubstantial creature, to which the creator, knowing himself to be disengaged and free from everything, is not bound, because he is just as able to destroy it as to create it. In that case, he who has reached this standpoint of divine genius looks down from his high rank on all other men, for they are pronounced dull and limited, inasmuch as law, morals, etc., still count for them as fixed, essential, and obligatory. So then the individual, who lives in this way as an artist, does give himself relations to others: he lives with friends, mistresses, etc; but, by his being a genius, this relation to his own specific reality, his particular actions, as well as to what is absolute and universal, is at the same time null; his attitude to it all is ironical.
— Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/introduction.htm#s7-3

He claims to include and digest The Irony, making this plausible by stressing what's shallow in it (ignoring its mystical depths.) But is this possible ? The 'Irony' is like Chaos or the womb of the gods itself. Hegel solidifies on its surface. Hegel, who knocked up his landlord's wife.

It's fun to imagine Hegel as an Ironist who merely pretended be the greatest of earnest systematizers. Or maybe he did swallow Irony, along with its mystical depths.

For at the stage of romantic art the spirit knows that its truth does not consist in its immersion in corporeality; on the contrary, it only becomes sure of its truth by withdrawing from the external into its own intimacy with itself and positing external reality as an existence inadequate to itself. Even if, therefore this new content too comprises in itself the task of making itself beautiful, still beauty in the sense hitherto expounded remains for it something subordinate, and beauty becomes the spiritual beauty of the absolute inner life as inherently infinite spiritual subjectivity.

But therefore to attain its infinity the spirit must all the same lift itself out of purely formal and finite personality into the Absolute; i.e. the spiritual must bring itself into representation as the subject filled with what is purely substantial and, therein, as the willing and self-knowing subject. Conversely, the substantial and the true must not be apprehended as a mere ‘beyond’ of humanity, and the anthropomorphism of the Greek outlook must not be stripped away; but the human being, as actual subjectivity, must be made the principle, and thereby alone, as we already saw earlier does the anthropomorphic reach its consummation.

The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom. This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity.
...
But the determinate being of God is not the natural and sensuous as such but the sensuous elevated to non-sensuousness, to spiritual subjectivity which instead of losing in its external appearance the certainty of itself as the Absolute, only acquires precisely through its embodiment a present actual certainty of itself. God in his truth is therefore no bare ideal generated by imagination; on the contrary, he puts himself into the very heart of the finitude and external contingency of existence, and yet knows himself there as a divine subject who remains infinite in himself and makes this infinity explicit to himself.

One feels like saying that "what makes the statement true is..." And here one wants to finish with "the statement itself", but that is wrong; — Banno

Why do you say that’s wrong? This is what I have been guarding against from the beginning. If it were the statement itself that makes a statement true, then there could be no false statements; every statement would be true by virtue of being a statement. If - as you say - this is wrong, then it cannot be that nothing makes a statement true. So if it’s not the way the world is (correspondence/realism) that makes a statement true, then what (antirealist thing) makes a statement true?

Can we imagine an ironist or jester, who plays at being earnestly systematic ? — Pie

Gore Vidal, although not a philosopher, springs to mind. :wink:

But if inferentialism is the right way to think about contentfulness, then the game of giving and asking for reasons is privileged among the games we play with words. For it is the one in virtue of which they mean anything at all — Brandom

Nice.

Again, the master-idea of Foucault’s critique of modernity is that reason is just one more historically conditioned form of power, in principle no better (and in its pervasive institutionalization, in many ways worse) than any other form of oppression. But if giving and asking for reasons is the practice that institutes meanings in the first place, then it is does not belong in a box with violence and intimidation, which show up rather in the contrast class precisely insofar as they constrain what we do by something other than reasons. — Brandom

I think this is well put and interesting point. I wonder what a Foucauldian riposte to this would be. Often felt that the postmodern challenge to rationalism and science and progress and its constant urge for reinvention is like a form of Romanticism, but with cynicism and disenchantment where hope and love used to sit.

Why do you say that’s wrong? — Luke

If the statement itself is what makes the statement true or false, then truth and falsity have nothing to do with anything outside of statements...

In your previous post the phrase was “that which determines whether a statement is true or false”.

What I'm positing is that the way of phrasing the issue in terms of making or determining is what is flawed.

And I'm not sure that is a point of disagreement between us.

Often felt that the postmodern challenge to rationalism and science and progress and its constant urge for reinvention is like a form of Romanticism, but with cynicism and disenchantment where hope and love used to sit. — Tom Storm

Nice.

you are making an assertion, and making an assertion is attaching a truth value to a statement. You can't make an assertion without asserting that some statement is true. — Banno

in order to have this discussion we make assertions, and in order to make assertions, we make use of truth — Banno

This just seems like begging the question.

To make the assertion "Rory Gallagher is the best guitarist in the world", I think of Rory's guitar playing, perhaps imagine it, or recall an opinion I had of it, do the same for other guitar players, see how each makes me feel, render that comparison into the words I've learnt will do the job of getting someone else to respond accordingly.

If my interlocutor seems unconvinced (furrowed brow, shaking head...) I might add "...it's true!", having learnt that those words will often yield a reconsideration, at least.

I'm not seeing, in any of that game any warrant for introducing the concept of 'truth'. The game seems to play out perfectly well without it. It seems at risk of become it's very own beetle. None of us here are adding ..."is true" to the end of our assertions, we seem to be mentally capable of making those assertions without running them through and additional concept filter in our minds that we call 'truth'.

We just infer that the policy seems likely to succeed (believing, claiming, asserting, using "...is true"...), then we enact it.

Where do we need a concept of truth in there? The entire concept seems, dare I say, redundant.

I'm not seeing, in any of that game any warrant for introducing the concept of 'truth'. — Isaac

So you do not take your own assertions to be true?

Ok, then.

I had thought you at least sincere...

So you do not take your own assertions to be true?

Ok, then.

I had thought you at least sincere... — Banno

Again, this is question-begging. You're taking the meaning of 'true' that you hold to construct the faux surprise that I would not hold my assertions to meet that criteria.

But it is your meaning of 'true' we're disputing here.

Yes, if I agree with you about what 'true' means, then it would be surprising if I didn't hold my assertions to be thus defined. But I don't agree with you about what 'true' means, so it is not surprising.

For clarity...

If someone asks (of an assertion of mine) "is that true" I usually take it to mean something like "if I used that policy would I likely find the same success you did?". In other words, "do you think we can share this modelling assumption"



I don't take it to mean "does your assertion have some ineffable property we all somehow share despite it not seeming to serve any purpose nor have any warrant to think it's even there."

I don't take it to mean "does your assertion meet some ineffable criteria we all somehow share despite it not seeming to serve any purpose nor have any warrant to think it's even there." — Isaac

Nor do I. It's not ineffable; the T-sentence sets it out exactly....

If someone asks (of an assertion of mine) "is that true" I usually take it to mean something like "if I used that policy would I likely find the same success you did?". — Isaac

Is that true?

And so on.

I suspect you have an interesting point to make, but exactly what it is eludes me.

Again, when one says that such-and-such is true, I don't thinks, bar the pragmatics, that they re saying anything more than that such-and-such.

They are not saying anything like "if I used that policy would I likely find the same success you did?"

What I'm positing is that the way of phrasing the issue in terms of making or determining is what is flawed. — Banno

I assume there is some criteria by which we judge a statement to be either true or false. You agree that this criteria is not the statement itself. Are you saying that there are no criteria; that this is a flawed assumption? Then do we judge truth/falsity at random, or not at all?

I assume there is some criteria by which we judge a statement to be either true or false. — Luke

A statement's being judged true or false is very different to it's being true or false.

when one says that such-and-such is true, I don't thinks, bar the pragmatics, that they re saying anything more than that such-and-such. — Banno

But this is not what the T-sentence says. The T-sentence says that "p" is true iff p.

What you've given above is an account of my actions regarding p - asserting "p is true" is the same as asserting p - Which is Ramsey's position.

In other words, asserting "p is true" does the same thing as asserting p (in the cases we're concerned with here).

The T-sentence goes beyond this redundancy to claim there is a property 'truth' which attaches to propositions and is met is the proposition is...[and then restates the proposition but pretending not to be stating it by omitting the quotation marks]

...and is met is the proposition is... — Isaac

Typo... not sure what this is.

Nice rendering of Ramsey, though.

Typo... not sure what this is. — Banno

Sorry, should be "and is met when the proposition is..."

Registering by bafflement at the criteria....

Nice rendering of Ramsey, though. — Banno

Thanks. His work on truth pretty much guides my thinking on the matter.

A statement's being judged true or false is very different to it's being true or false. — Banno

Are you talking about the world in itself? I could be wrong, but I think that’s different to @Pie’s post-Kantian views on the topic.

Also, what you quoted from Davidson earlier also refers to the world making our sentences true or false:

And it seems to me that this is what Davidson is saying in suggesting we give up our dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality: that there is no such separation between our true statements and the way things are. We “reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false". — Banno

...there is a property 'truth' — Isaac

The assumption that because there is a predicate - "...is true" - there must be a property of which that predicate is the name , is fraught with reification. Same issue as with Luke on the previous page. But this is going to get difficult, since we are now differentiating performative deflation from disquotational deflation.

Cheers. Not a bad puzzle.

Are you talking about the world in itself? — Luke

No; more about the distinction between belief and truth.

Also, I don't think Davidson holds that there is some causal link between the antics of familiar objects and our opinions; he would not, I think, interchange "make" with "determine".

I have variously referred to “reasons for why we say that a statement is true or false” which Isaac took issue with; “what makes a statement true or false”; “what determines the truth or falsity of a statement”; “the criteria by which we judge a statement to be true or false” and possibly more in an attempt to get my point across. I was never committed or meant to imply a causal role -even though our judgements might be said to cause a statement to be true, at a stretch. Do you now acknowledge that our statements have truthmakers?

Cheers. Not a bad puzzle. — Banno

Likewise. An endless pursuit, I think, but no bad thing that.

So now I'm backtracking to the Strawson-Austin debate.

Roughly, and here mimicking Strawson, if you know what an assertion is, you already know what truth is. Hence there remains something insincere, or at least disconcerting, in your proposing that one can make an assertion that is free of entanglement with truth.

For Ramsey, "p is true" means the same thing as "p". So he must agree, I think, that to assert that p and to assert that it is true that p mean the same.

t is when you introduce a human or some sort of human-like observer that we start carving up the world, identifying real things that happen (truth?) and things that don't (falsehoods?). — Jerry

Apologies for being late to this party but I was stuck by this. Surely there are no falsehoods without a conscious entity to make them. I.e. truth is the default state of the universe, those truths might be unrevealed without a conscious entity to discern them but they are still there, simply as properties of the universe. However falsehoods can only be brought into being in the imagination because by definition something that is not true does not exist as a fact outside of a consciousness

firstly "is true" looks clearer than either "denotes" or "describes" — Banno

Which is clearer: "word and object" or "sentence and situation"?

You might say the second is more suggestive of 'fit'. Fair enough. That hardly makes it clearer though.

and secondly we can ask if it is true that this "describes" or "denotes" that, — Banno

Sure, and hence the relevance of

Some of the trouble traces back to Alfred Tarski's unfortunate suggestion that the formula " 'Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white" commits us to a correspondence theory of truth. Actually it leaves us free to adopt any theory (correspondence, coherence, or other) that gives " 'Snow is white' is true" and "snow is white" the same truth-value. — Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters

Whether a word fits an object is a matter of whether an individual use - say, Humpty's - fits or coheres with the general.

For Ramsey, "p is true" means the same thing as "p". So he must agree, I think, that to assert that p and to assert that it is true that p mean the same. — Banno

I think Ramsey's redundancy is better thought of as (sure I'm quoting here but can't for the life of me find it, so call it a paraphrase) 'there's noting more to asserting "p is true" than there is to asserting "p".

The significance of 'nothing more...' is that it allows for "p is true" in some cases to mean nothing at all (rather than mean the same as "p") Saying 'it doesn't add anything' isn't quite the same as saying 'it means the same'.

Ramsey's position is clever here, I think, because he avoids what he saw as the excess of full redundancy in that 'true' still had a purpose. Using "everything John says is 'true'" as an example. That can't possibly mean the same as {insert everything John says}. It's just that adding "... is true" to each and every thing John actually says, adds nothing.

I think I'm right in saying that Ramsey still would agree with your broad point, but for him, the question of 'what is truth' cannot be answered without a discussion of belief (which I understand you see as almost unrelated?). Ramsey saw the meat of the matter to be in what saying "p" actually means in the first place.

One of the differences between Wittgenstein and Davidson, it seems, is Davidson’s idea that rule-following and convention is not essential to “language communication.” Davidson’s view is that communication doesn’t require “rule-governed repetition (this is taken from Davidson’s paper Communication and Convention 1984).” Davidson points out that a speaker may use words differently from those around them, and it seems that the interpreter usually understands what the speaker is intending to mean apart from convention. It seems, in Davidson’s view, the intention of the speaker is more important than the rule-governed activity of language-games within a community. I’m not saying that Davidson eliminates language conventions. He just believes that what the speaker intends by their words has a more prominent role. This seems to fly in the face of Wittgenstein’s view that the inner self plays no role in the meaning of words. Or, more precisely, that the role of the subjective doesn’t play the role that Davidson seems to emphasize. Wittgenstein emphasizes the community much more than Davidson does. My current belief is that this idea, at first glance, flies in the face of Wittgenstein’s ideas, or what many believe to be Wittgensteinian ideas.