Philosophical Investigations

…As Wittgenstein observed in the Philosophical Investigations (1953), the aim of philosophy is “to shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.”

Wittgenstein’s concept of seeing-as (Philosophical Investigations, 1953). Wittgenstein pointed to the epistemological significance of puzzle pictures, such as the ambiguous “duck-rabbit” that can be seen either as a duck’s head facing one way or a rabbit’s head facing another way. The enlarged concept of experiencing-as (developed by the British…

Wittgenstein regarded his later book Philosophical Investigations as just such a synopsis, and indeed he found its proper arrangement enormously difficult. For the last 20 years of his life, he tried again and again to produce a version of the book that satisfied him, but he never felt he had…

In the posthumous Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein advocated that, in solving philosophical problems, an understanding of how language is used is more important than its abstract meaning (i.e., the context in which a sentence is uttered may be more useful in determining its meaning than its innate semantic…

…passages in Wittgenstein’s late masterpiece Philosophical Investigations (1953) attempt to unseat the notion of private experience. Their interpretation is endlessly controversial, but the basic idea is that objects of thought cannot include elements that are purely “private” to a single individual—as sensations, for example, are supposed to be. For if…

…used considerations originating in the Philosophical Investigations (1953) of Ludwig Wittgenstein to raise skeptical questions about whether knowledge of linguistic meaning can be reduced to rule following, or indeed to any objective facts about speakers. Although Kripke himself drew no conclusion on this point, his discussion was widely interpreted as…