Dear all, This is to remind you that the next meeting of the Serious Metaphysics Group will take place today (Wednesday, November 6th) at 4:30-6pm in the Philosophy Faculty Board Room. Roland Krause (HU Berlin) will give a talk entitled "Wittgenstein's verification of verificationism”, see below for an abstract.
Hope to see many of you there! Abstract: In § 43 of his Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein famously claims that the meaning of an expression is its use in speech, and indicates that this is a claim about the meaning of "meaning". In §§108 and 109 he claims that he is just describing the use of expressions in speech. Put together, these two claims seem to commit Wittgenstein to a problematically circular argument: For to assume that in describing the use of the expression "meaning" in speech he says something about the meaning of "meaning" seems to presuppose precisely what he argues for. Wittgenstein himself seems to be aware of this apparently problematic circle in his investigations, but his solution to it is rather cryptic. Elsewhere the circularity of his investigation of meaning is seldom noticed and much less addressed. I think this problem is not only interesting for exegetical reasons, but rather an instance of a problem which every account of the concept of meaning has to address in some way or other. In my talk, I will therefore try to understand the problem and to defuse it with philosophical gain. To this end, I will use and develop the distinction between semantics and metasemantics first formulated by David Lewis. All the best, Benjamin _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
