The first half provides a standard exposition of Cavell on
Wittgensteinian criteria, while in the second half the two potencies of the voice return to the foreground.
(55) In the book, Bobbitt engages in a
Wittgensteinian project of investigating the uses and practices of constitutional interpretation and outlines a basic syntax of six modalities of constitutional argument.
I put it like this to emphasise at the outset that this is not the application of
Wittgensteinian ideas to psychotherapy, with a view to suggesting that this is an improvement on competing explanations.
This results in systematicity (and by extension scientific knowledge) being something more like a
Wittgensteinian family resemblance concept than one with an essentialist definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.
"But no one has to get shot," the subtitles chide us, as we switch to a white backdrop, on which Ping-Pong balls circulate and bounce in explanatory diagrams, suggesting the interchangeability of terms such as "rabbit, duck"; "visible, invisible"; "cool, uncool." Before long, we have fallen down a
Wittgensteinian rabbit hole, as the screen cuts to a shot of the words WHAT IS REAL?
The second main category, the revisionist, also breaks into three sub-categories: these essays seek to recast 1) Kuhn as a
Wittgensteinian; 2) Kuhn as an evolutionary epistemologist; and 3) Kuhn as a combination of social historian and developmental psychologist.
Julian Lamb's essay turns on the nice irony that Johnson's dictionary aimed to stabilize the language by excluding foreign loan words and the terminology of the trades and professions, which he felt were transitory, while seventeenth-century dictionaries focused on exactly these 'hard' words and implicitly adopted a
Wittgensteinian definition of meaning as language in use.
After the
Wittgensteinian "dry-cleaning" process, language appears better able to be manipulated for traffic in certainty as well as uncertainty.
then describes a
Wittgensteinian approach to conversion: "At some point later in life, we might overthrow this world-picture in favor of another, but this would be adopting a whole new way of seeing nature, a conversion experience" (45).
I initially struggled with the report's overuse of
Wittgensteinian aphorisms.
From a
Wittgensteinian point of view, the moral subject's relation to the world conceived as a totality is the only thing that matters--and, astonishingly, there is only one such subject, me.
In fact, Geertz and many other cultural and linguistic anthropologists, discourse and conversation analysts, and cultural, discursive and narrative psychologists in the wake of Vygotsky and Bruner, have essentially contributed to carrying out the
Wittgensteinian turn in our understanding of mind and culture.