Winter’s entire essay is structured around such small coups de theatre, which culminate in announcements of such banality that they are made ludicrous by the portentous, jargon-ridden analysis that precedes them. Does anyone think that Wittgenstein would be shattered to be informed of such revelations? Or that it is really ‘news’ that we use knowledge from one domain in assessing another? Or that meaning is dependent on experience? To maintain otherwise would turn autonomy into autism.
Evidence
Winter heatedly denies that he “believes that there must be ‘something standing between the Constitution and our understanding of it … I have argued, in contrast, that . . ‘the meaning of [the Court’s] constitutional interpretation is as much a matter of… our interpretive commitments, as it is a matter of the understanding of the Justices.’"" g And here one begins to see the problem: What exactly does Winter think this “understanding” consists in? If it is a matter of interpretive commitments, objectified sedimentations, and the like, then is Winter’s outrage really justified? — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 366 (
#responds-to, via linked claim)
Categorization
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
- XREF: connects to: Complicated cleverness can be worse than simple sense — , A Year of World Stories, 5572; There is scarcely a page of Wittgenstein’s work, including his work on the foundations of mathematics, that is not devoted to an attempt to rescue our understanding of meaning by linking it to the ordinary practices of human beings using language; and the many striking examples of Wittgenstein’s imaginative anthropology are testimony to his commitment to the imaginative nature of rationality.; Winter insists that ‘[t]he importance and ubiquity of imaginative processes such as metaphor undermine the Wittgensteinian claim that there is no more to meaning than its performative significance within a social practice.’ Is the use of ‘metaphor’ not a social practice? (+4 more)
Related
- Winter is not writing about Wittgenstein, but about the Wittgensteinian account, which I fear must mean me. (similarity 0.95)
- Winter’s denial may be inconsistent with his own theory of meaning (similarity 0.92)
- Yet, there is scarcely a page of Wittgenstein’s work, including his work on the foundations of mathematics, that is not devoted to an attempt to rescue our understanding of meaning by linking it… (similarity 0.92)
- Winter insists that ‘the importance and ubiquity of imaginative processes such as metaphor undermine the Wittgensteinian claim that there is no more to meaning than its performative significance… (similarity 0.91)
- Winter misrepresents Wittgenstein by attributing to him a composite of several thinkers’ views. (similarity 0.88)
- Wittgenstein denies psychological effects any necessary role in meaning while not denying their reality. (similarity 0.83)
- Wittgenstein never treated practice as an isolated conceptual primitive (similarity 0.82)
- When Winter discloses that ‘in effect, then, Bobbitt concedes that law faces the very predicament that Unger identifies’—that legal decisions are sometimes indeterminate—he discloses nothing… (similarity 0.81)
- Ethnophilosophers undermine their own thesis under Wittgenstein-Quine logic (similarity 0.80)
- Understanding a linguistic practice does not require understanding larger social practices first. (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Yet, there is scarcely a page of Wittgenstein’s work, including his work on the foundations of mathematics, that is not devoted to an attempt to rescue our understanding of meaning by linking it…
#contradicts(0.85) - Winter insists that ‘the importance and ubiquity of imaginative processes such as metaphor undermine the Wittgensteinian claim that there is no more to meaning than its performative significance…
#responds-to(0.80) - Winter’s denial may be inconsistent with his own theory of meaning
#responds-to(0.75) — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 366